Vision 5

We come to Vision 5 and we're looking to appreciate that consciousness is a field. As a phase it's a process phase that is akin to the process phase of nature, in that both are fields. Myth is a process phase but it is a flow rather than a field and we're using the analogy of the Gulf Stream in the Atlantic Ocean. Nature is like the ocean and the mythic flow of experience is like the Gulf stream within that. But consciousness as a field is not an integral field like nature, so that the forms that emerge out of consciousness, instead of being integral, they are differential.
The easiest time-honoured way to understand the difference, the existential forms that come out nature are like the raw stones whereas out of the field of consciousness those stones have been cut into jewels, so that what distinguishes existence is that it is literally pragmatic. It's based on actions that one really does and it is precise to almost any degree that whatever it is that you are really doing, that has, really, an effect. Of course if you are deceiving yourself and you're believing that you are doing something different to what you really are doing, or you're deceived by others so that you're thinking that you're doing something which is quite real but what you're doing is based on a misconception, then there will be discrepancies, discrepancies in your experience of false belief and discrepancies in your conception of false doctrines.
One of the qualities, traditionally, of vision is that it is prophetic, and so right away the strongest warning against false prophets is from the historical Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew, which is the earliest, written, actually, within about six to eight months of the crucifixion-resurrection in 37AD. Matthew was a customs inspector and came from a long traditional family of Levites who were priests from the time of Jacob, about 1,800 years before Matthew, whose real name was Levi, and he was given the name Matthew, which means, it's a Greek way of condensing the Hebrew phase Gift of God. Jesus called Matthew Matthew like he called Simon Peter Cephas, the rock. He called James and John Boanerges which is usually translated as Sons of Thunder, but it doesn't mean sons of thunder at all, it's actually a very learned literary word that comes from Alexandrian sophisticated literary scholarship on Homer. Boanerges is the Greek exclamation that warriors in the Iliad yell just before they're ready for the victory push in the battle.
At any rate, the whole emphasis in the integral cycle started by nature as a field and brought into form existentially by ritual action and that generates, then, the flow of experience which, when it flows, the images of experience have a natural tendency to line up. They line up on the traction base of the steps of the action. The actual action that you do will generate the mythic flow of what you actually experience but if you're deceiving yourself, your actual experience will not jibe with the actual things that you are doing and it will become anxious in your feeling. The images will not be clear, they will not focus. They will be jittery, they will be out of focus. The language, instead of flowing in a narrative that has its flow, like a good river, like a good stream, will have interruptions and jaggedness or will back up and become swampy.
And so one's language more and more begins to disclose that you are fooling yourself, that your experience is not really based on what you are actually doing but is being cribbed and forced. And so the mind, then, as being the culmination of this whole integral cycle, the mind as a structure of thought as a form, but instead of being like the forms of ritual, which are pragmatic based on what you do, they are based on the logical structure of the way in which it's put together in the mind in thought, in ideas, in conception. If your experience is anxious and nervous and your images are not clear and they are confusing and your language narrative is interrupted, the mind then seeks to rearrange everything so that it fits.
This is the way in which strong doctrinal thought tries to superimpose, then, the right way to act, the right way to feel, the right images to have, the right language to use, the right storylines that you will believe. All of this must then come together in a mind, the structure of which will have its larger resonance of integral in the social world. This is the origin of tyrannies of individuals, of their minds over their lives, of heads of families over the lives of everyone else in that family, of the heads of tribes of everyone else in that tribe, and so on, all the way up to large societies like nations, like international confederations, like a global government. All of this, if that were all there were, would lead, finally, to a settling of the strongest possible integral structure of thought dominating everything else and settling it once and for all and one would have had long ago a perfect tyranny that works for man because nature will have to move over, existence will have to modify itself to fit how we want it to be.
And the world would have ended up, as William Faulkner described it in his Nobel prizewinning speech in 1954, he said if man could have his stubborn, wilful way, the whole planet would be paved, you could drive anywhere that you wanted with no obstructions and you would be able to make pit stops and get your fuel, your oil, your food, your sex, your pleasure, everything, in one pit stop spurt so that you could drive on again anywhere that you wanted unobstructed. He said, 'I refuse to believe that this is the future of man' and then he paused in his delivery in Stockholm and he said, 'There will be, on that paved planet of tyrannical perfection of man, one thing he cannot stop: the sound of somebody talking and saying, "I don't believe it."' "This is not true, this is not right, because I see it differently. I vision it different from this" and that eventually this quality of the opening of different possibilities frees man from what would be a wilful tyranny and has done so for apparently tens of thousands of years at least.
And so our species, Homo sapiens, got modified about 45,000 years ago and became Homo sapiens sapiens. We're not just wise hominids; we're wise about being wise. We know that it is important and essential not only to organise everything into its integral cycle but to keep that integral cycle open at its centre and entrances and exits to its periphery and interspersed all the way through its texture and its form and its content to allow for it to breathe, to allow for human beings wise about being wise to have access to a different dimension hat is not integral but opens up possibilities: it can be different. This distinguishes, then, our special species from earlier forms of hominids who would find the optimum way to do something and then would just do it forever like that.
One of the great proofs of this we talked about when we did the ritual and the myth phases. One of the hominid species before us was called Homo erectus, man who not only stands upright but stands tall. The complete Homo erectus skeleton that was found by Richard Leakey and his friends in Ethiopia was a young man about 17 years old, he was about six feet tall, he was a runner and he lived two million years ago. He had a physiology, he had a brain, he had a capacity of survival that led to the dispersal of Homo erectus two million years ago all over the Eurasian continent and African continent, so that you find developments from Homo erectus in China, in Europe, in Africa, wherever they went.
One of the things that distinguished Homo erectus is that as a hunter he knew how to make flint, spear points, really well and so he was the most successful predator on the planet two million years ago. But what was characteristic is that no matter where or when you found Homo erectus spear points, the really good spear points, they never improved in two million years. Louis Leakey's famous comment: Homo erectus made beautiful spear points stupidly. Never improved them, never varied them, whereas what is characteristic of Homo sapiens sapiens is we are constantly experimenting to try something different, something new. Lots of times it doesn't work out but it works out enough times that over a very short period of time, about 45,000 years, now there's 25 45,000 years in a million years, so you're speaking of a species that's been around only 1/50th, only 2% of Homo erectus who has jumped from making those kinds of spear points to putting Cassini around Saturn a billion miles away and getting images back daily of places that weren't even visible with the best telescopes until our past 20thcentury.
We have jumped because our differential visionary consciousness comes into play in such a way that the more that we utilise it the more there is, the more that it's there. And so the differential field of consciousness is something that needs exercise and one of the qualities that exercises it is creative imagination. Homo sapiens sapiens children who are nourished to be creatively imaginative continue to be creatively imaginative, usually during their entire lives. Those who are put into little temporary creative imaginative things, like a creative kindergarten and then slowly put into a grade school sieve where they are taught to behave in the way society wants them to be, they more and more lose the wings of creativeness. They lose the imaginative edge and more and more they begin to fit into a dull, down, round controlled by levels of tyranny that become emotionally untenable, objectable, ferociously fought against on every single level: the body; the experience; the thoughts and especially the crying out to have some visionary opening, of seeing a way out, seeing how it could be different.
We're taking, in our learning, the phases which wean us away from the number one tyrannising thought structure that has come down increasingly for about the last 6,000 years and that is that civilisations, as the largest structure, are structures of the mind and that whoever controls the civilised structure of thought then controls man at the highest level. This is completely erroneous and false but the way that it is promulgated, the way that people are sieved into this is because their education progressively funnels them into believing this, accepting this, and the mark that is on that is that learning on higher and higher levels is limited to subjects that are narrower and narrower and narrower and you become a beautifully great expert on one little nib of something that is just a cog in something else. And so human beings like ourselves, in a global tyranny, have become extreme experts on almost nothing, so that we are learning to be brilliant stupidly.
That leads to extinction and because time has speeded up, it leads to extinction quicker and quicker, and a single generation of mankind, now, with the technological capacities to amplify it, will live in a decade what used to take a century. At the end of the 2010s, it will happen every single year, quicker and quicker. Now this is not a speculation that has just recently been made, the first person to understand this was Henry Adams. He used to call it scientific history and he took the motion of history and based it on a very early kind of a model of analytic on the thermodynamics of gas pressures and he came out with a date. He said world civilisation will suffocate itself in 2021 because nothing will be allowed to be that could disturb the ultimate power structure that now channels everyone and everything from before birth to after death.
Our learning is about a century later and is refined about 1,000 times beyond what Henry Adams was able to do. What we are looking at is a way in which to acclimate ourselves, not just progressively but differentially to the major visions that have been at the junctures of the changes of ages because it turns out that history is not a function of the mind's structure at all but history is the flow of a differential stream within the field of consciousness. Just as vision is affine to nature and can act in its place, history is affine to myth and can act in its place. So history is a conscious river, not of an integral but of a further differential and so the right way to speak of it is that visionary consciousness is differential, historical experience is kaleidoscopic. Out of that kaleidoscope, all things are possible. One learns that this stepped up consciousness means that the greater variety in Homo sapiens sapiens, the safer the species is. Instead of asking the old Kantian moral imperative, before you do anything, you must ask yourself, 'What if everyone did this?' the existentialist anti-imperative is to ask yourself, 'What if no one tried this? The universe might be minus a value. Give it a try, see what comes out. If it's not life differentiating, if your facets of your jewel-like prismatic qualities are being impaired, do it a different way, then. Don't keep doing it that way.'
So we are learning how to be gems of persons rather than cogs of wheels. We're learning to make improvements where we don't make just different spear points but we may not make spears at all. We may use laser beams. We may use beams of light that is not found in the four dimensional nature, a super light, who knows? We have a huge new instrument coming online at the end of 2007 outside of Geneva in Switzerland, the great CERN accelerator and its beams are so powerful as to be able to fractionate the particles of some atomic particles down to a compressed vacuumous origin called a Higgs boson which is an interface with a whole different realm, many dimensions beyond the four dimensions of integral nature. The key to it is to understand that theories that develop consciousness do not occur in the structures of symbolic thought. They occur in the play of differential consciousness in the creative imaginative vision field. And so to teach children how to keep alive their creative imagining all their lives is giving them access to an unlimited field of creativity.
We're taking a look in Vision 5 in the second pair of visionary works. The first pair that we took was the classic refinement of Taoist vision to a point to where it became not just the seed but it became the pebble which when creatively thrown into the field of consciousness, the further ripples of it developed into Zen, developed into the Vajrayana, developed it into enormously sophisticated qualities of men and women which were already evident some thousand years ago. If we look at the ceiling and wall paintings of a place like Dun Wong, an oasis on the edge of the Gobi Desert, just as you enter into Western China proper, that were done a thousand years ago, they put modern art to shame. You get a super Matisses in hundreds of caves that show not only subatomic particality but they show resonant waves that only appeared in late 20th century science. And you begin to see that once one opens up differential consciousness to actually have prismatic forms of person, to radiate them jewel-like, what occurs out of that is the kaleidoscope of a historical consciousness that then opens up the capacities to know infinitely. It has no limitations whatsoever. One can continue to learn, one can continue to enquire, we're without end.
We took Chuang Tzu as the way in which classical Chinese Homo sapiens sapiens found a visionary way to let the field become infinite without destroying nature so that the natural field that was an integral was able to accept the entire differential conscious creative imaginative field in such a way that the two did not form a synergy but they formed what would be called a syzygy, that is a complementarity so that it works in either way. It works either spirals getting bigger and bigger or it works by spirals getting smaller and smaller. It works either way and everything in between begins to have the characteristic of expanding the possibilities of both the smaller and smaller and the larger and larger at the same time, so that you get a full parenthetical sphericality around every insight. Instead of an insight being a moment of inspiration in a mental structure, it now is the beginnings of a whole new universe of possibilities, in and of itself, so that one becomes more and more expert at more and more different kinds of possible worlds. One becomes magical and mysterious to an nth degree because the binary of an integral will always be a zero and one but the binary of a differential is a zero and infinity.
One of the qualities, logically as a structure of thought of zero and infinity is that the beginning and the extension of it as far as one could go are interchangeable, so that the zero and the infinity are interchangeable, you can have the beginning or the end at the beginning or the end. And so the infinitude is right there at the origin. While one from an integral starts at reacquiring the zeroness again, the no mind instantaneous insight which sustains itself, it is at the very same time an eternal infinite and so one has a very paradoxical quality to differential consciousness. Vision, when it is paradoxical, has its own tone. The mind sees it as surreal because it's a juxtaposition of aspects that don't really belong together but for visionary consciousness it is the kind of creativity that produces art. One produces not only works of art but one produces the artists and the more that a prismatic person creates and remembers in their creating the more kaleidoscopic is the historical dimensions that they are capable of.
They open up not to a tyranny of some kind of structure but they expand out to interface with the entire cosmos. Instead of there being a universe they must fit into they are harmonically resonant with whatever the cosmos is able to play with: today, this year, this millennium, this eternity. And so the play is essential in creativity. The play that also has the differential conscious functioning of remembering, that the play does not occur just in some kind of vacuousness but occurs within a remembering. In art the differential ratioing is that the creative imagination is there at the beginning and in history it's that the remembering now functions there at the beginning. And whereas art, finally from its creative imagining beginning, opens up the capacities for civilisation to occur and have it remembered, when the kaleidoscopic historical consciousness flows within the field of visionary consciousness it flows in such a way that now remembering takes the top part of the ratio and the creative imagining takes the lower part of it. And you get a sysergy of those two ratios, so that art and history are indelibly related, just like ritual and myth were related integrally but art and history are related expansively in a differentiality.
And so you find the conviction in Homo sapiens sapiens at least 40,000 years that when they are able to see, envision, in this way, they make works of art and arrange those works of art so that they are able to tease out of themselves more capacities to make more works of art, to live artistically. And one finds then Palaeolithic cave paintings, Palaeolithic sculptures, Palaeolithic temples, not of a religion, but of a progressive initiation where one is more and more able to leave the surface world and to go into a deep underworld through which one goes through an initiatory cycle and is able to emerge out into the world refreshed with a new capacity. Not just to make better spear points, but to understand that you do not have to go hunting those animals all the time, you can live with them in such a way that you can make friends with them, you can tame them. And you can tame the plants so that now they live with you where you're living. Now you're farming, now animal husbandry comes into play and the more that one makes friends with the plants and the animals, the more one realises you can make friends with minerals and with metals. And so Homo sapiens sapiens became a differentially conscious friend to all of the aspects and elements of the world, not seeking to dominate it but to bring a creative imagination into play and remembering hw to do that so that now the ecology of the entire world is not just natural but is playful. Let's take a little break.
We use pairs of books like a tuning fork and we use a series of pairs of books like a series of tuning forks. If you've ever seen someone tune a piano you know that they have quite a large set of tuning forks and once that piano is in tune, now you can play music whereas before, though the instrument was there, it was not tuned, it cannot play music. It can make noise it can make sounds, it can make approximations of music but it will be out of tune. If you know what music is, your ear will pick up that this is out of tune. For someone like myself, I can tell if someone is out of tune and why and I know how to tune it so that the entire range is back so that the instrument now will play whatever music you want to play.
This is a very difficult thing to do when you expand the range of who is being tuned. So that as you are being tuned your range is also, the array is expanding. One of the concomitants of this that if you don't follow using it the tuning will either outstrip you or your impatience to just try to make something work before you get the tuning up to that, either way there will be an inapplicability of it. You won't be learning whereas if you do get tuned whatever occurs from there on, you will be able to tune yourself indefinitely and your capacity to learn will be infinite, indefinite. So this is a new scale, not of Homo sapiens sapiens but what I call the new species: Homo sapiens stellaris. We are going to be home on star system wide dimensions which will give us a frontier that is interstellar and we will be at home in many star systems, without end. Our Milky Way has several hundreds of billions of stars and there are several trillions of galaxies so the range of being at home is not just mindboggling but it is explorable. But making the transition from a subject-dominated political rhetoric, tyrannical, wilful, neurotic world, to an open creative, zero to infinity binary takes a while, takes an application and it takes doing it.
All of the aspects that are in here are meant to increase your ability to ratio, to proportion, to add more facets, so the more that you actually play with this, the more that it will refine itself. For the music, the films, the books, and we use books not because they are intellectual but because they are the way in which the social structure and the structure of thought have been tuned increasingly over the last about 6,000 years, 4,000 years, really strongly. About 4,000 years ago the first refinement of language into an alphabet increased the capacity to intensify language enormously. The first international civilisation was about 4,700 years ago and resulted in a whole wave of architectural developments that are noticeable on a wide swath of the planet.
Whereas something like Stonehenge before 2600BC was a collection of just dug out moats that were arranged with wood posts about 2,600 years ago, the culmination of the experience of several thousand years of working with that kind of play resulted in the ability to raise from wooden poles to the great bluestone Trilithons of about 50 tons each into an enormous structure that has survived all this past 4,600 years. That was contemporaneous with the building of the pyramids in Egypt, contemporaneous with the building of ziggurats in Mesopotamia and of structures in India like Mohenjo-daro in Harappa that had working urban sewer plumbing 2500BC, enough for 400,000 people, all of a sudden, to live in a large urban structure. This was a thousand years before the so-called sophisticated Aryans came in with the Rig Veda. The original dark Dravidian Indians had already mastered the art of urban planning to the extent of cities the size of Long Beach 4,700 years ago.
The quality of these advances of these thresholds follows a periodicity. It's like the periodic law of elements, of how they structure themselves, civilisation in its kaleidoscopic historical flow has resonant sets that can be understood as sets and that those sets nest together in a harmonic that is extendable. So that if one wants to build a new civilisation, a new level of civilisation, one needs to know what was the true sets of civilisation before and how they nested together and how the new one will be differential conscious kaleidoscopic, historical flow differentially of extending the harmonic. This is what we are doing. We're developing a pioneer population that it will be able to teach themselves on any level, the pacing, the making of the resonant set of the next civilisation, the star system stellar civilisation, so that it will be an extension of the natural harmonic that has developed over time.
One of the periodicities that classically is used in a wisdom historiography is that of a period of a thousand years. We call it a millennium. And the thousand years has a quality where it itself was a pair of 500 years cycles called in ancient times the cycle of the Phoenix so that a pair of cycles of the Phoenix were a millennium and a pair of millenniums were an aeon. And that if you arranged the tuning of kaleidoscopic historical consciousness so that you had the aeons arranged in a completed cycle, that completed cycle, which normally would be 24,000 years, actually turned out to be about 25,600 years. The aeon, the millennium had a little bit of overlap, it wasn't just simply a thousand, but a little bit so that when you arranged those twelve aeons in that cycle, one would have what was called the great year.
The first persons to understand the structure of a great year like this, in its completion, were the early populations about 2000BC in Mesopotamia. They understood that the way in which one could keep track of this was not just to keep track of the sun and the moon - the phases of the moon, the place of the sun, the places of the planets - but the shape of the stars, in the way in which the path of the sun would move, which enfolded the way the path of the phases of the moon would occur, which enfolded the ways in which the five wandering stars, the five planets, would go and that this turns out to be, in fact, the plane by which our planet moves around our star, the plane of the ecliptic. And that by portioning out the gestalt of the stars into twelve different zodiac signs, one would then have a way of computing where one was on the great year cycle.
The difficulty was that where on the cycle are you? That there must be not only the beginning of a cycle of the Phoenix a beginning of the millennium, a beginning of the aeon, there must be a beginning to a great year cycle. And that when all of this is in its different sets arranged, one now has a harmonic which strikes what is called, in music, a chord. Every element of that resonant set will share, in the extended intensity of its furtherance, the chord quality and so finding and determining where the chord was became increasingly the problem in civilisation after about 2300, 2400BC; 'Where is that chord?'
The earliest genius in establishing the basis upon which the need to find that chord was a king of kings, the first king of kings on this planet. His name was Sargon of Akkad. Sargon of Akkad was the prototype of Moses. He was set adrift on the Euphrates river in a little woven basket sealed with pitch. He was discovered in a bed of reeds on one of the banks of the Euphrates and he was discovered not by a woman but by a man. The man was the raiser, the famer, of the domesticated date palms for the largest, most powerful central kingdom in Mesopotamia at the time. He was the royal gardner of date palms. The date palm, as we talked about when we were in our phase - if you remember we used the work of Enheduanna and we put together the way in which in myth Inanna, Queen of Heaven, used all the elements of a date palm, the roots to make a certain kind of a hoop, the trunk to make the post of her royal bed and of her royal throne and the palms of the date palm to be woven in such a way that it would make a patterning and that all of this then - showed that the date palm was a way in which the way of earth and heaven and man were brought together in a single access, in a single pivot.
The figure who did this was Inanna. So Sargon's daughter Enheduanna was the genius who first used a written, literary level of language in the known world. She is the first one to be able to not just use language in pictographs or ideographs or cuneiform signs to note down numbers or to make little business transactions or to keep king lists, she was the first to be able to use a written language in such a way that it became world literature. She was the tap root of world literature and she wrote not only the Inanna epics which are the first beginnings of world literature, but she wrote something for her father, for Sargon, because he had a far-flung international trading caravan confederation that went all the way from the Indus river in India all the way cross what is today Iran, what is today Arabia, the Euphrates, the Tigress, the Nile Valley, all the way to the Mediterranean and up into what is today Turkey and all the way to the Aegean coast of Greece.
This was 4,400 years ago but the integrity of such a far-flung caravan network had to have a security where it was not dominated by a single temple group, by a single sect of religiousness but there had to be a weaving of all of the temples of Mesopotamia, of the Tigress-Euphrates area into a pliable fabric where they all participated in a new whole and it was Enheduanna who did this. She went to the 44 different temple sects of ancient Mesopotamia, ancient Sumer-Akkad and she took the language flow and the integral thought structure of each of the oral traditions of these 44 different temples and she reworked them into temple hymns that were written and then collected all the 42, it's not 44, it's 42, 42 temple hymns into a set. It was that set of 42 temple hymns that was the first time that there was a visionary religion that was not dominated by a mental structure, that was not based just on integrating a tribal local mythology, that was not just developed in experience of a certain limited ritual way of doing things of some limited area, that what one had now was a weaving of a fabric of a visionary quality that led to the development of not only world literature but of an international art.
One of the first international arts that came out was that you could not just tame metals but you could bring metals together that were tamed in such a creative way that now you made a new metal that did not occur in nature. The first metal that was made was bronze, the first new metal. You took copper, that had been used for several thousand years, and that by adding slightly less than 4% of tin to that copper, in a very special metallurgical alchemical way, you produced bronze. A bronze weapon, a bronze instrument, was many dozens of times more powerful than any copper tool. And so when the bronze age came into play it was not just that man had better tools or better weapons, he had a better understanding of how to ratio nature into a creative way so that you now had an art of metallurgy. That you could take minerals and work them together, or herbs that had certain mineral contents and work them together, and now you could make medicines that were not there in nature until man creatively, imaginatively and remembering how to do it, now made new compounds, new molecular structures on every level.
What was necessary was to make a new kind of mankind so that they would be able to not only remember how to do this and value it, but be able to expand it creatively in their own way, understanding how to make the expansions so that it was real and not fictive, so that it was life affirming and not destructive. We live at a time where the powers to destroy have become almost nightmarish: a single group of dedicated destructors can take out a ten million person metropolitan area by one dirty bomb. So we are lagging behind enormously of how to adjust the species to be able to understand 'Don't do this this way, this leads nowhere.' The next 2,000 years after that showed that Sargon of Akkad, about 2350BC, an aeon after him is Alexander the Great, almost 2,000 years to the day, making the quality where one has an incredible, indelible quality of expanding the nature of international, inter-kingdom man so now it was expandable to include the entire world, if need be. That it would not be limited to a large swath like from Ireland to India, but would be able to encompass the entire range of what men and women are as Homo sapiens sapiens.
That there would be the possibility of having a harmonic of mankind and the Greek word for that was the ecumenae, a word that he learned from his tutor, his teacher, Aristotle, who learned it from his tutor of 20 years, Plato, who learned it from Socrates who taught him and a number of others but Plato was by far the most brilliant of the students of Socrates. But Socrates had learned it from a woman, Diotima, who was from a little Greek city Mantinea, but she had been a Pythagorean, she had learned it from Pythagoras, and Pythagoras who had refined it from the wisdom of ancient Phoenicia, where the alphabets were first made, from 22 years in Egypt, from eleven years in Persia, from studying with the greatest of the Greek pre-Socratic teachers in the Aegean and by his own brilliance. And so one finds that if you can trace lineages and you can trace historical periodicities one can come to understand how everything works and what it is and what it's for and how to utilise it, how to improve it, how to carry it forward.
The jump from Enheduanna's 42 temple hymns, the next integral of it was done by a woman, a black woman from what is today Ethiopia, her kingdom ran from Ethiopia on the Red Sea across the narrow isthmus of the Red Sea to Southern Arabia and her name was Makeda and she is known in history as the Queen of Sheba. The Queen of Sheba was the most intellectually intelligent woman for many, many centuries. She lived about 1000BC so she lived about 1,300 years after Enheduanna. She brought the condensation, the integration of the fabric of the 42 temple hymns into such a focus that she wrote the Song of Songs which is a book in the Old Testament. She used her relationality to the wisest man of the time, Solomon. She and Solomon together had a different relationship but one that was an expansion of the relationship of Sargon to his daughter Enheduanna and her 42 temple hymns. Now, Solomon, who was running the centre of the great caravan routes that had come after 1,300 years, to occupy a very intense centre, the centre ran from India along the Southern Irani coast, along the Southern Arabian coast and up the Red Sea or up the Persian Gulf into Mesopotamia or especially up the Red Sea up the Gulf of Aqaba. To a port where he had made an arrangement to extend the largest shipping empire in the world at the time, not that it went so far as India, it in fact went even further, but that its level of ships were many, many times.
The average trading route in Solomon's time by caravan or by ship to go to India or any other place was about three years, so that a trading mission, a trading expedition would take about three years for it to run its course; to leave with its cargoes, to drop off and carry and go to its destination farthest and come back was about a three years period. Solomon made a deal with the head of the Phoenician maritime trading routes that didn't go east but they went west. They went west several thousand miles along the entire Mediterranean sea north and south coast, they went through the straits of Gibraltar, down the coast of Africa, almost as far as what is today Dakar in Senegal, it was a very long way, up the European coast, all the way along Spain, along France, along Britain, so that you had trading routes from Africa to the British Isles and all of the Mediterranean. All of those shipping routes came to rest in the great Phoenician cities, the most important of them at that age was Tyre.
The king of Tyre's name was Hiram. Hiram was powerful because he inherited a thousand years of alphabetic language. He inherited a landscape that was partly mountainous and covered with huge forests of cedar trees that made the best ships, not just masts but could be cut into the plankings and so his kingdom held the source of all the ship building that was superior in the ancient world. All of the ships built in Egypt were built of the cedars of Lebanon. All of the Phoenician ships were not only better and faster and more capacious, capacious in the sense that they were larger, but they were capacious in the sense that they were able to carry, not just cargoes but colonists. And so they set up Phoenician trading colonies all along the Mediterranean, all along the coast of Spain and of what is today Morocco and introduced into those areas pools of where international language now seeded alphabetical language. So that people could learn to write, for the first time, in such a way that they could not just limit themselves t o mythological tales of talking but they could read each other's visions, each other's great works of art, appreciate each other having aspects that came from thousands of miles away, people they had never met but had learned to appreciate.
So that you would find certain implements that were distributed over a wide swath of the world in Solomon's time. One of the things that was most distributed was the realisation that there was such a thing as not just a king of kings but there was such a thing as a son of a great warrior king who was now the greatest wisdom king. Just as David is a great warrior king, his son Solomon is a very special wisdom king. His relationship to the Queen of Sheba, Jesus refers to her as the Queen of the South because it wasn't just Sheba, it was Southern Arabia which was called Saba and there were many other cognate parts to her empire. The Northern part was called Nubia and was an ancient part of Egypt back in the early dynasty times, all the way down into black Africa, all the way down into what is today Kenya.
So she had contacts in such a way but they had a tradition where the powerful leader was a woman, was a queen, not a king. But because they were increasingly in contact with kingdoms that had kings, she had to find a way to have a special child, a special male child who would then become the special king of Sheba. She realised that the father needed to be the most extraordinary man alive that she could find and she chose Solomon. So that the Queen of Sheba, Makeda and Solomon met and they spent some time together long enough for her to get pregnant in a very special way. Her son then was named Menelik and he became the King of Sheba, what in ancient times was called Abyssinia sometimes it's called Ethiopia today. The quality that is there is that he left an impress because when he was 20 years of age and ready to become the King he went on a search to find his father who was dying, Solomon only lived to be in his early 50s. When Makeda [Menelik ?] came to Solomon, he realised that the symbolic prism that was the fount of Solomon's whole wisdom structure was the arc of the covenant. And so Makeda [Menelik ?], considering himself the true son of Solomon, stole the ark of the covenant and took it with him back to Ethiopia, back to Abyssinia, back to Sheba, and made an impress so that the kings of Ethiopia held their lineage for 3,000 years, 235 generations.
The 235th generation was alive in some of our lifetimes; his name was Haile Selassie, the King of Ethiopia. He was a magnificent figure who traced his lineage all the way back, naming every single generation to Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. The Song of Songs is like the Bhagavad Gita to the Upanishads. The Song of Songs is the Bhagavad Gita of the temple hymns which is now not just 42 temple hymns of Mesopotamia but all of the temple hymns of every known people in this whole great world swath. And so the Song of Songs is about the way in which the archetypal weaving of this is the way in which love brings together what would be opposites in a way that they create the pattern which can go on to any fabric of any resonant harmonic whatsoever. The way in which human beings can be tuned so that now their extensive, expansive capacities of kaleidoscopic historical consciousness is into the eternal and that's what the Song of Songs is about.
A thousand years after the Queen of Sheba, after the Song of Songs, after Solomon comes the Odes of Solomon, written in the early half of the first century AD and the Odes of Solomon are 42. They take the hour glass integral of the Song of Songs and open it back out into 42, but not the 42 temple hymns of the 42 different Mesopotamian temples but the 42 generations that went into making from Abraham to David and Solomon to Jesus. And so the Odes of Solomon are the hourglass of taking the original millennial forerunner of the Song of Songs and later in a millennium opening it back out again into infinity. Here is a pair, the author and the man, the new Solomon, and the author is as a woman, Mary Magdalene, making a tuning fork that I call a shared presence so that what occurs, then, is a broadcast done once and for all available to anyone eternally. It is a way of stepping up into an extension of the art of person sharing to a cosmic eternal field which in itself is that field of nature. So we're looking at something that is extraordinary and we are pairing, with the Odes of Solomon, Shakespeare's greatest last play The Tempest. When they made the first folio of Shakespeare, the prize of the work, the jewel of the ring is The Tempest. Next week we'll go into the incredibleness of how Shakespeare came to do this. Thank you.