Vision 6

We come to Visions 6 and since most of you are watching this by DVD and at later dates by perhaps some years or some decades or some longer time unit, I'll take just this moment to position where this presentation occurs in a double cycle. This is half way through the first of four phases of an eight phase double cycle. The first four phases were delivered in a way to show how things come together, how an integral cycle occurs from nature to symbolic thought and how the completion of that cycle has a peculiar quality of transformation. The transformation initiates a second cycle; not so much a second cycle or an epicycle but an expansion of the original cycle into an ecology of consciousness. And so our second year - because we're taking an annual cycle in order to accommodate the actual occurrence of the rhythms in nature, which affect the way in which existence occurs, which generates experience, which fits into that cycle and the structure of symbolic thought - then, gives an integral to that entire cycle which is natural and has a periodicity based on the movement of the sun, the movement of the phases of the moon, the positions of the stars and constellations in the sky, the seasons on the earth, the different cycles to which our physiology is inherently stamped with, the way in which our psyche is given a fleshing out of images and feelings and language.
And that all of this becomes expanded in the introduction of a new dimension that does not occur ostensibly in the cycle of nature, the cycle of nature is characterised by four dimensions and like the four seasons they present a completeness: the three dimensions of space; the dimension of time. In fact with the special and general theories of relativity Einstein showed that space time is a fabric and occurs indelibly together. We have seen that time is not a fourth dimension as it is in space time, in relativity, but in actuality there is a conversion of this and time is the first dimension. This allows for us to appreciate that the zeroness of nature has as its first initial movement the momenta of temporality of time. As soon as time occurs, space blossoms out of time and the space time fabric acts as if it were a dynamic continuum as well as a fabric structure, as well as a form. This form and this dynamic, the form that has a space, a spatial emphasis and the dynamic which has a time emphasis actually occur in the natural integral cycle as polarising elements. Such that by the late 1920s a physicist named Werner Heisenberg could come up with the uncertainty principle that one can never tell in nature both the location in space and the location in time for an observer who is looking at that experiment, that there will always be an uncertainty which can be parred down by probability but does not disappear.
So that one of the characteristics of an integral cycle is that its forms, initially, are based upon polarity and its final completion is based upon structures of symbolic thought that will arrange polarities so that their periodicities will form a completeness. We are now with the sixth vision lecture in the first phase of the conscious ecology, discovering an understanding that while we can base ourselves initially on nature, initially on the integral cycle and initially accept the completeness of symbolic structures of thought, they, by their completeness, generate a further extension, a further expansion. The first expansion that occurs is that a fifth dimension comes into play, a quintessential dimension of differential consciousness which introduces vision.
The time honoured way to understand the relationship of the integral natural qualities that are integrated by the brain, by the mind, by symbolic thought, undergo an epical transformation into visionary qualities that has a quintessential five dimensional flow. That eventually changes the way in which space time itself operates, transforms all of the existential forms, recalibrates all of the structures of thought and introduces, then, further developments, that differential consciousness will make new kinds of forms and those forms will be not based on pragmatic action but on prismatic resonance. Those forms of prismatic resonance will engender a new kind of dynamic, never before seen in nature, directly related as an expansive differential correlate to the field of consciousness. Those forms will be forms of art: the art of architecture, the art of painting, the art of poetry.
In fact all of the classic early Greek arts were all inspired by muses and there were nine muses. The nine muses were put into a set by a completing tenth who was the Greek mythological figure of Apollo and so art was always the nine muses held together, as a new kind of divine form, by Apollo. This quality of the muses, when they were grouped together as a set of nine, places of learning now transcended the limitations of education by natural means. They were now an expansion of the way in which one could mature, one could learn by inspiration from any one of the nine muses or for really talented, special, artistic, spiritual persons they could encompass several, and eventually all of the nine muses and become themselves, then, an Apollo, which by putting the set of the nine muses together with a tenth, which they now were, as the artist who created their person. Not just works of art but created their person in a new transformed way. This perfect ten transformed spiritual person would be able to masterfully engender the high kaleidoscopic consciousness of history.
In that historical flow, of a great many more dimensions than nature had, history now would replace the mythic experience of mankind, of all sentient beings, no matter what star system they would live on, no matter what planetary or moon characteristic environment. They would have engendered a different kind of a flow from just experience, which is integral, because historical experience has the ability to go back into a past and to go forward into a future and to creatively, kaleidoscopically transform whatever present moment there was by a new past and a new possibility of a future at the same time. And so the transformative qualities of a spiritual art of person prism, is that it can create a variety approaching an infinite scale of possibilities and out of this infinite scale of possibilities arose the recognition, the realisation that the universe was a form it he mind. It was an integral idea, it was the structure of thought and that the actuality, the reality of it is that the cosmos is that very infinite variety of a jewelled matrix, of all of the spiritual persons that the cosmos entertains in its livingness in many, many dimensions beyond four.
Our learning is meant to raise our species out of a limited global view that somehow the global nature of man is going to fit with the greatest idea that we could have of ourselves and of the achievement of completeness and all of this is rather sophomoric. To pluck us out of the areas of landscape and geography and history where some people are Greek, some people are Chinese, some people are Jewish, some people are Muslim, some people live in a place called Iraq, some people live in a place called India. All of these limitations are characteristics of a mythic, a mythological flow of images, of feelings, of language, that integrate into ideas about them. All of this is passe. Passe in a very real sense because there are already human beings alive who have made the transformation, who have made the recalibration and now are checking whether throughout the entire star system, are checking out the relationalities of different star systems, are studying already the harmonics of resonances of whole galactic structures and a cosmos, a cosmology of enormous infinities has occurred already and we are very deep into this.
What has not occurred is there has not been a way to mature ourselves into this expansiveness. This is one of the pioneering efforts towards achieving that. Those of you watching this at some future date will be able to look back from retrospection and see how this originated and came through. For the vision phase, because it begins the way in which the ecology of consciousness occurs, we are taking the techniques that we used for the whole first year and now running them in a further expansion. We found that one of the deepest qualities of integrals is that there is a polarisation and that that polarisation requires a pairedness that has a number of characteristics. The pairedness will be such that it will have an electric polarity, that the electric flow will be between a positive and a negative and that two positives will not want to be together and two negatives will act in a very peculiar interchanging way.
One of the difficulties in atomic physics was how to understand the difference but the correlation between the movements of electrons and the movements of protons and how it could be that the stacking of protons in larger expansions required a neutron, which was a neutral charge particle, that allowed for a packing of protons and neutrons as nucleons. In such a way that there was a point at which the centre of more complex atoms found a completeness in their stacking, the ability to have not only the strong force holding them together but repelling so that they did not turn into mush and become just a blur but a distinct structure that could then reflect completeness was a huge discovery in the latter part of the 20th century.
We are looking at a way to take the polarisation of pairedness in, not just its polarisation in terms of electric, and not just in terms of its chiral spinning left and right, and not just in terms of the chiral spinning of left and right but left and right in terms of the clockwise or counter clockwise motion of particles themselves. So that spin and charge and several other aspects of natural structure to which we are now alerted all influenced our ability to see that if we took single ideas, single plans, single structures into play, it would prejudice us to a misunderstanding that would not be detectable. And that the only way to proceed was to take the characteristic structure of existentiality and of symbolic thought and work with pairedness but pairedness not just so that it could be true to polarisation or true to symmetry or true to spin, chirality, but the two related as a tuning fork. It is this tuning quality of pairedness that allows us to understand the initial ways in which integrals occur and sustain themselves and have form and have process where the dynamics actually are able to generate the next stage of form and forms which are able to generate the next movement of dynamics. But the pairedness as a tuning quality, especially, was difficult for our inheritance of the last 5-6,000 years.
That inheritance included one of the largest mental structures ever made on this planet, and that was the idea of a civilisation and the beginnings of civilisation, about 5-6,000 years ago, formed an almost insurmountable problem for our kind, for our species. About two thirds of the way through this, about 4,000-4,500 years ago it became exacerbated because out of the many different civilisations that were maturing, civilisations along river systems like the Indus civilisation in India, the Nile civilisation in Egypt, the Euphrates and Tigris civilisations in Mesopotamia, the Danube civilisation in Europe, or the Aegean civilisation of the islands of the Aegean including Crete and on over to Cyprus. Or in other areas of the world, the early Chinese civilisation of the Hwang Ho, the Yellow River or the Yangtze River, south East Asia with the Mekong River and several others, South India with some of its rivers like the Godavari, the Ganges.
All of these flows, these river civilisations or these island archipelago civilisations like in Indonesia or the Aegean, other parts of the world, all of these civilisations began to have international, inter-civilisation contact and the very first successful inter-civilisation contact, as we have been talking about, goes back to about 25,000BC, and reached a successful apex very early on with one of the most masterful figures in planetary history, Sargon the Great, Sargon of Akkad. One of the peculiarities of it was that this early civilisation that linked India with Mesopotamia, with Egypt, with the Aegean, with the Northern reaches around the Black Sea, with the southern reaches, all the way down into Southern Arabia, Ethiopia and so forth, this very large civilisation was called, at the beginning of the 20th century, the Fertile Crescent. But more than the Fertile Crescent, one has to understand the extent of it, all the way from India to Greece, from Southern Europe all the way down to the beginnings of black Africa.
The range of all of this was held together by an original king of kings and Sargon was the first king of kings; not that he ruled of these other civilisations but that he provided the caravan routes, the models pioneered of how to hold together disparate groups, disparate cultures, disparate civilisations, even, into a grand network, a web, if you will, of commerce. Requiring a new kind of language, requiring a new kind of architecture, requiring a new kind of person and that the pioneering of that new kind of language, that new kind of person, that new architecture, that new web, that new net of intra-civilisation humanity, though it was set up by Sargon and carried through by several succeeding generations of his family - there were about five generations altogether that held the viability - the genius behind it was a woman. And we talked last week about Enheduanna, that she was the first great figure in world literature because language had refined itself that for the first time it would have a written form that could be translated into a number of major languages in different regions, different districts.
And her Inanna Epics were the first great literature in the world but she backed it up with a group of 42 temple hymns going to each of the 42 temples in Mesopotamia and taking their mythologies from all 42 and putting them into a new harmonic where the temple hymns now raised the mythology of the different regions into a grand array of a cosmic historical vision. We saw how about a thousand years after Sargon the figure of Moses being set adrift on a river in a woven basket and then being discovered by royalty and raised and becoming a prince who became one of the great conquering heroes of planetary heritage is all based on Sargon of Akkad who went through this a thousand years before Moses. But how there was a wave of consolidation that happened several hundred years later. For Moses the consolidation came with a pair, the king who was strong, who set up a special kingdom and a son who gained that kingdom and a new kind of wisdom that came out of it. A wisdom that was based not on just being raised within a special mythology or being raised within a geography that was just of its own integral significance but the figure of Solomon was one who was raised to be international, inter-civilisation, from the beginning. Raised in such a way by his mother Bathsheba that he was sensitive to the universal qualities of mankind.
And in a way Solomon had a compliment, Makeda who was the Queen of Sheba, who, together with him, formed a new kind of a special pair, whereas Enheduanna had been the daughter working with Sargon her father, now Makeda was the woman, who was Queen in her own right, who came to Solomon as a special king in his own right. Their liaison was not so much for a marriage but as a special spiritual coming together so that their son would be a very special person. And we saw that Menelik, the son of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, eventually when he grew to manhood went to find his father and realised that the source of the symbolic integration for Solomon's wisdom expansion was the Ark of the Covenant. And so Menelik, thinking himself the rightful heir to this, stole the ark of the covenant and took it back to Ethiopia, took it back to a sight not far from the archaeological modern day sight of Axum and maintained a lineage that lasted deep into the 20th century.
Haile Selassie was the 235th person in that lineage from Solomon, from the Queen of Sheba, and that in a very odd way the Jewish heritage and the Arabian heritage are linked together in a mysterious African unity, not discernible by either part, by either population until they would expand their vision to be able to see that one is working here with something that is a synergy of different kinds of culture, different kinds of civilisations. Because the Ethiopic culture integrated a different kind of a quality whereas the Fertile Crescent that used an arc from the Persian Gulf over up along the Euphrates and the Tigris Valleys, the river systems, the Tigress going up into northern what is today Turkey and Armenia and the Euphrates going, arcing over very close to the Mediterranean coast to where is today Lebanon and down to Egypt where the sight of Jerusalem would be the place at which that arcing crescent would have its two great power centres: Mesopotamia and Egypt. And it would be on the cusp of the two geographical, geopolitical power centres and would be then the earthquake epic centre of that Fertile Crescent arc.
The other arc goes from Egypt down to Ethiopia and over to India, so that one has, in the ancient Ethiopian tradition that there is a link between India and Egypt centred therein the royal centre of Ethiopia, a different kind of Jerusalem, a southern complement to Jerusalem. There at the Axum area was another colossal earthquake centre for planetary civilisations and curiously enough the geophysical aspect is that the Great Rift Valley, which is the deepest rift valley in the surface of the earth, runs down the Jordan river [...] The Great Rift Valley runs from Mount Hermon down the Jordan River, through the Dead Sea, down to the Gulf of Aqaba, down the Red Sea to Ethiopia, to Eritrea today, to Afars, and down Africa, all the way down to Lake Victoria. That Great Rift Valley in the earth links Ethiopian centre between India and Egypt and the Lebanon Jerusalem linkage between Mesopotamia and Egypt and so you have, in that one deep rift, the linking of two nodes of the way in which the planet must transform and 3,000 years ago they were linked together by Solomon and Sheba.
The marriage contract between them, which was a spiritual marriage, not a political marriage, not an ordinary marriage - I Believe in Hebrew it's Ketubah, the marriage contract. The marriage contract between Solomon and the Queen of Sheba is the Song of Songs in the Old Testament and the Song of Songs is the median model between the 42 hymns of Enheduanna, founding world inter-civilisation reality for mankind, for the first time. And the Odes of Solomon which we are going to take a look at after the break, written in the 30s of the Common Era, written some 2,300 years later and I will present to you a fairly good case that this was written by Mary Magdalene. So between Enheduanna and Mary Magdalene is the great fulcrum of the Queen of Sheba. And so with three great women writers, world civilisation, over a period of 2,500 years, rose to a threshold to where it was able to get an expansion into a harmonic that was so new and so radical very few people were able to understand it because it required getting out of your individuality to be able to participate with its resonance.
This for most people was a sign that you had to die in order to get there and could that possibly work? It took about 1,600 years for it finally to be able to be handled by somebody who was so masterful in their poetic language that they could work with the ways in which the polarities and the chiralities of male and female, of polarity itself, of the social realities that we are demonically protecting against any kind of interference with this beautiful, rational structure, and that figure was William Shakespeare. We'll take a look during our last second half of the presentation of why Shakespeare was so peculiar and why his language raised the poetic of Enheduanna, the Queen of Sheba, and Mary Magdalene to a new level where Shakespeare is able to be played all over the world in whatever language is used, and the spirit of the play comes through. Let's take a little break.
We're looking at the remarkable manuscript that is written in Syriac and Syriac is an ancient language, it is the written deeper symbolic form of an oral language, Aramaic, and the discovery of this manuscript in January of 1909 was a cause celèbre throughout the world. The only indication before this manuscript really surfaced, in a miraculous way which we'll talk about in just a moment, was that a London physician named Anthony Askew, quite wealthy, when he died in 1785 one of the things in his library was a manuscript, a very early manuscript, and his heirs didn't want it. And so the British Museum bought it because at that time the British Museum was acquiring, at a very rapid rate, an enormous number of books and artefacts and eventually became the greatest repository in the world for these kinds of items. A Danish minister named Munter, in 1812, managed to be able to read enough of the manuscript and come out with the fact that this was a book called the Pistis Sophia, the Faith of Wisdom, Wisdom Faiths.
It was a dialogue between Jesus and his coterie of disciples which included women as well as men, which was rather unusual. The interplay was that of expanding the philosophic dialogue form, that is familiar to us classically from Plato, to a dialogue where the explication of the meaning was an expansion based upon a model of poetic insight that was a special kind of poem called a Psalm. A psalm or a hymn, a hymn is in praise of divinity, a psalm is man's thankfulness for the blessings, for the challenges, for the encouragements of the relationship to divinity. An ode is a classic forming of a psalm to a hymn raised to a personal art, like Shelley's Ode to the West Wind. The Danish minister identified that in the Pistis Sophia usually the psalms of David were used as the model of explicating the deeper meaning of the riddle or the challenge or the question that Jesus would introduce to be discussed, to be needing to be unfolded but that five of these hymns were ascribed to Solomon, not to David.
It's true that we can read it in the psalms and recognise that there are many psalms that are not by David, they are by the sons of Cora, by other individuals, even some by Solomon. But in the Pistis Sophia, five examples are used as Odes of Solomon and they are used on a level, on a par, of importance and sacredness with the psalms of David. So the search was on for 97 years: 'Where, what are the Odes of Solomon?' That they should be on a level of sacred scripture with the Book of Psalms in the Old Testament, 'Where is it? Where are they? What happened to them?' A Dutch scholar who had English connections, eventually, named J. Rendel Harris, in early 1909, January of 1909, was in his study, he'd come over from Leiden, Holland, and brought a number of students. He had done some lecturing at Cambridge but he was ensconced at Manchester University in England. He had some academic time free and he went to the stack of manuscripts on many shelves and he brought down the sheaf of the leaves and began reading through them and came quickly to the realisation that this was the missing Odes of Solomon, almost complete, almost all 42 hymns were there. Missing were the first two hymns but one of the hymns in the Pistis Sophia, the manuscript we have of the Pistis Sophia goes back to the third century, goes back to about 250AD, 250CE but was copied at that time and goes back to the early second century, goes back to around 130CE, 130AD.
Rendel Harris was extraordinary enough that he recognised that one of the odes in the Pistis Sophia which was number number 19, the 19th Ode of Solomon, was actually the 18th, the first 18 were the Psalms of Solomon that were collected together with the 42 odes to Solomon making a set of 60 and that the 19th was actually the first Ode to Solomon. There is an extraordinary difference between the Psalms of Solomon and the odes of Solomon. He, with another scholar, named Mingana did a two volume, The Odes and Psalms of Solomon. The first volume was put out in 1916, during the First World War, second volume 1920, right at the conclusion of the Second World War, and they were an update of the first edition which was done in 1909 which is entitled An Early Christian Psalter. Psalter is a collection of psalms and it's published in London 1910. The second Ode to Solomon has never been found but 41 of the 42 have been found and mostly translated beautifully by Randel Harris and a wonderful American hermetic American scholar named James Hamilton Charlesworth did an edition of The Odes of Solomon for Oxford University Press in 1973. It was reissued by the Society for Biblical Liteature, the Scholars Press, The Odes of Solomon, the Syriac texts and this was published in 1977 and then later on from Sheffield University in England, Charlesworth put out critical reflections on the Odes of Solomon and this was done in 1998.
His conclusion runs, 'The numerous and pervasive parallels between the Odes and John' that is the Gospel of John, especially the first letter of John and of course the Book of Revelation, a great portion of the New Testament 'the numerous and pervasive parallels between the Odes and John cannot be explained by literary dependence of the odist on John or vice versa. See also next chapter. The most likely explanation for the similarities analysed above is that the odist and John shared the same milieu and it is not improbably that they lived in the same community.' Is a matter of great historical record that the community that St John matured in was Ephesus, in Asia Minor, what is today Turkey. Ephesus was a massive city in the first century of the Common Era, first century AD, one of the largest cities in Asia, on a par in population and in international power with Antioch which is on the coast which is today Lebanon Syria area. They were large cities that were just somewhat less than the powerhouses of the ancient Greco-Roman world, the two great cities of Rome and Alexandria.
St John grew up matured as a young man he loved in Galilee. His father was named Zebedee, his brother, famous brother, was named James, one of the apostles as well and his mother was named Salome. Salome was the oldest sister of Jesus so that John, St James and St John were nephews of his. Jesus had four brothers and four sisters. The four sisters married extraordinary men. Salome married Zebedee who ran a great fishing industry in the Sea of Galilee. He was not just a fisherman, he was very wealthy. In fact St Peter was even wealthier and the archaeological excavation of Peter's house in Capernaum, right on the Northern shores of Galilee is one of the largest houses of the time. He was a wealthy man. All of these were very special people. The next oldest sister of Jesus from Salome was named Mary after her mother and she married a man named Clopus. They had a house in Jerusalem that featured very prominently, they had a number of sons, the youngest son of theirs grew up to be St Mark. His real name was John Mark, so he was also a nephew of Jesus. A third sister was named Joanna and she married a man named Chusa who was one of the great economic advisers to Herod Antipas and his territory was not only Galilee but the East trans-Jordan province of Peraea that went all the way down to the far eastern shores of the Dead Sea and reached all the way up to the shores of the Sea of Galilee.
The fourth sister was named Susannah and her husband was Joseph of Arimathea who ran the great shipping caravan routes along the ancient Phoenician lines going all the way through the Mediterranean Sea, out through Gibraltar, down the African coast somewhat of what is today Morocco but the main route went north to the north western province of Spain called Galicia, to the Brittany coast of France, of Gaulle, at that time, and across to the Cornwall-Somerset coast of England because those three coasts were sources of very rare, necessary metals. The most precious of those coasts was the Cornish coast of England across the Irish Sea from Ireland and from Wales, and it was one of the major sources of tin in the ancient world. You cannot make bronze without tin. While there are many sources of copper, there are only half a dozen major sources of tin in the world at that time and the major source was there on the Cornish-Somerset coast and so Joseph of Arimathea ran shipping caravan routes all the way back to the coast of what at that time was a part of the Roman province of Palestine.
The major port at that time was for them Tyre. Tyre is one of the most ancient cities in the world. The other major port that was made recently there at that time was Caesarea but it was a Roman dominated port, it was an imperial kind of a port and Tyre was a commercial port that had been international for more than a thousand years. Those four sisters had a particular quality to them in that they formed a group that had a quintessential fifth woman and that fifth woman was Mary Magdalene. She was the conscious fifth dimension to the four dimensions of womanhood that grew up and surrounded Jesus, complementing his four brothers. One of the qualities was that while all of his sisters resonated to him, none of the brothers believed in him until after his death and resurrection. His mother knew of special qualities and special powers but considered them on a very lower level. She is the one that asked for water to be turned into wine at the marriage ceremony in Cana and his response at the time was, 'What have you to do with me? It is not yet my time. You want me to use divine powers that are meant to transform man to make more beverage for a marriage.'
In another part of the gospels he is told, 'Your mother and brothers are outside' and he tells the population of men and women learning from him. 'Who is my mother? Who are my brothers? You are my mother, you are my brothers.' One of the qualities in the Odes of Solomon, is that from the beginning through progressively an array of structures you have a language which goes all the way back in its divine hymn origins to Enheduanna. In her temple hymns, at the beginnings of international world civilisation, with a fulcrum at the Song of Songs by the Queen of Sheba, written in such a way that some of the language of Solomon is brought into her Song of Songs and so you have her hymning drawn out with intersperses of Solomon's beautiful response and wisdom and in the Odes of Solomon you have one of the most elegant language forms of the classic world. In those 42 hymns the quality of poetic is extraordinary and when one sees the 18 psalms of Solomon, their language is inferior by several orders.
Those psalms of Solomon, in that 18 part, are the crumpled, soured, fearful, apocalyptic leftovers of something that has been collapsed and ruined whereas the Odes of Solomon progressively run in a beautiful quality of a poetic presentation that develops an expansion more and more so that one comes to the great concluding 42nd ode. One has a vista into infinity. Now 42 is three times 14 and it is the 14s that align because a 14 is a half of a lunar cycle. And so when you have 42 you have time and time and a half and you find this phrase in the Book of Revelation 'Time and time and a half.' It is a kind of a special rotation where the spin is not a half, it's not a whole, it's something three halfs. Now we know from atomic particles that most chirality will be one half spin or one spin, very rare will it be that there are particles that have three halves of a spin. They are the indication of a threshold of the emergence into the electromagnetic spectrum of energy and matter from the magneto electric ranges at about ten billion times the frequency.
The Odes of Solomon have this deep quality of being able to take what is a polarity, what is a counter chirality and to bring both of them into the polarity into a complementarity, the counter chirality into a woven multidimensional quality of rotation, so that one gets a spiralling out and a spiralling in at the very same time. One gets a spiralling out into infinity and a spiralling into a zero point. Now, a zero point is the classic Pythagorean beginning of geometry and if one looks at the first textbook of geometry in the world, Euclid's Elements, written in Alexandria, about 300BC, the very first sentence in Euclid's geometry is that a point is a locus of no dimension and when a locus of no dimension moves it generates a line which is a first dimension. When a zero point in a natural electromagnetic field has movement, time is generated as a first dimension. When a line is looked at in terms of its existentiality in a geometry, the two ends of a line will be points, that is to say they will be locuses of no dimension so that time moves from zero to zero and in between it will generate a dimension that appears as time.
Now you could go to your tenth grade geometry text and read how out of this you could develop the whole idea, and Pythagorean discipline of how a line, when taken as a line, will be the place at which the extent of it in two dimensions will be a plane, and that that two dimensional plane, then, will be the characteristic of the symbolic structure, the mental thought form of what something is and thus in high school texts it's not called the Elements of Euclid, it's called plane geometry. Later when we do art we'll find that Kandinsky did a little volume called From Point and Line to Plane because he was one of the most esoteric artists of all time. He's the one who first developed that there can be an abstract art that needn't have any images whatsoever. One finds something very close to Kandinsky and Kandinsky's paintings when one goes to the great apex of Mahayana art in Central Asia and Far Western China about a thousand years before Kandinsky. What we're looking at here is something where what is the affinity between the odes and John, they most likely lived in the same community,
The odes in John clearly share numerous parallels with the Dead Sea scrolls, these similarities are seldom in terms of fundamental concepts, just occasionally in images, frequently in terminology. Both the odes to John could have been influenced independently by the Essenes of Essene literature or could have received these influences at approximately the same time from Essenes living within or contiguous with their community, in the case of the odist we should take seriously the possibility that he was a converted Essene.
You see the assumption that it's a he. See if this sounds like a he. This is the 14th ode of the 14, so it's the end of the first third,
As the eyes of a son upon his father, so are my eyes O Lord, at all times towards thee. / Because my breasts and my pleasure are with thee. / Turn not aside thy mercies from O Lord: and take not thy kindness from me. / Stretch out to me, my Lord at all times thy right hand and be to me a guide to the end according to they will. / Let me be pleasing before thee, because of thy glory and because of hey name. / Let me be saved from the evil one, let thy gentleness O Lord, abide with me and the fruits of thy love. / Teach me the odes of thy truth, that I may produce fruits in thee. / And open to me the harp of thy Holy Spirit, so that with every note I may praise thee, O Lord. / And according to the multitude of thy mercies, so grant unto me; and hasten to grant our petitions; for thou art sufficient for all our needs. Hallelujah.
In the 42nd ode, one finds a characteristic couple of lines, they are extraordinarily graphic, 'I extended my arms and approached my Lord: / For the expansion of my hands as His sign.' The expansion of the hands is the ancient orinz [?1.06.46] aspects which goes back to Palaeolithic times and one finds in the very earliest qualities of catacomb Jewish Christian art, one finds the orinz position. It is a position which is a sign and my extension - now his translation, Charlesworth, he uses the extension is the common cross that was lifted up on the way of the righteous one. But I have given a different translation here because of amending some of the language in the notes, there is a predisposition, there is a sieving of symbolic structure and form and many other aspects which I am not limited by. It reads like this,
I extended my hands approaching my Lord: / For this expansion of my hands is His sign: / And extension is the erect tree that lifted up the way of the Righteous One. / And I became useless to those who knew me not thus do I hide myself from those who possess me not, and I will be with these, his, who love as me.
And a couple of verses later,
And I threw over them my yoke of love; / Like the bridegroom arm over the bride, / This is my yoke over those who know me. / And as a bridal feast is spread home by bridal pair, / Thus is my love with those who believe in me.
We're going to go into the Odes of Solomon more as we go on for the next two presentations but now is the time to come to the pair, because we're always pairing. And we're pairing so that we can tune what traditionally was either a text or a was excerpted bits and particles of a text put together in a textbook. The twin evils of false maturation on this planet can be traced to those two causes. If you limit yourself to a written language that is in a text you predispose yourself to always looping back into the mind for the confirmation of its form and of its meaning. If you excerpt and you have just bits of many different texts which are then put together as a compendium, as a textbook of excerpts or examples, you mulch them together, you mash them and you get a succotash that eventually becomes a pablum, very easy to feed to others, keeps them babies, they do not mature.
In between the text and the textbook is secret, it's an ancient secret, it's a way of taking the text in its own art and lifting it off the page by a visionary technique so that the spoken voice, which is characteristic of the origins of language in the mythic experience, resonates to a visionary expansion of that primordiality of language and results in a poetic which is always declaimed, that is to say one has to read the poem out loud. One has a play in a text form but it has to be performed and if you can't perform it, if you can't read it out loud, it loses its poetic and becomes then just a text. It becomes something which the silent mental structure will be able to assess in its own way about meaning but when you see the play played out now you see the hidden life that was not discernible in there.
Shakespeare, always, in his dramas, since he was a young boy used a special kind of a periodicity, and he preferred fours and the play that we are using The Tempest is the fourth of a matrix of four plays. The first play is The Taming of the Shrew, followed by Midsummer Night's Dream. The second part of that sequence is Twelfth Night followed by The Tempest. The two nodes of the dramatic structure, like the summer season and the winter season, like the solstices, the summer solstice of this four season Shakespeare cycle is Midsummer Night's Dream, the winter solstice is The Tempest. The spring equinox is The Taming of the Shrew and the autumnal equinox is Twelfth Night. This is the way a star system teacher teaches literature.
Shakespeare's poetic worked out over a period of, let's see, Taming of the Shrew, is 1592, The Tempest is 19 years later, 1611,so in a 19 year cycle these four plays present not just the seasons of a year on this planet but the 19 years cycle is a complete lunar phase cycle which first gains its appearance on the planet accurately at Stonehenge, 47,000 years ago. It is the 19 year cycle of the posts that, in their season, make a quality that leads eventually to a realisation that there is a way to factor the phases of the moon in a very large cycle with the cycle of the sun, mixed with the cycles of the constellations of the stars and the seasons of the earth and one comes out with a grand vision that there is order in the universe but there is a harmonic in the cosmos. Just knowing the order in the universe is like having a still snapshot. It was true when you took that snapshot but if you put it into motion, not just as cinemagraphic but into live life you have to work with a harmonic because the snapshots, if you look on them, will just be a very large scrapbook.
It will be good for a scrapbook, textbook type stuff, it will never be alive. A poetic is a living language. When you come to the qualities of Shakespeare, we have to recognise something about his bringing up. His mother, Mary, was Catholic, his father, John, was Anglican, was a Protestant. He grew up in a family, he was born in 1564, and one of the things that happened when he was just a boy in the 1570s, is two great crusading waves went through England, especially out from London, from the continent, from other power structures. One of the waves was the Vatican, Roman Catholicism, trying to recapture from the Protestants the English in the countryside and the Protestant reaction to that was 'We will kill anyone who tries to interfere with us in a Papist conspiracy' and many people, many relatives of Shakespeare on his mother's side, were killed officially.
The second wave was the first public theatre groups in the world were formed in London and went on tours of the provinces to bring plays, secular plays, for the first time in human history to a population of people. They appealed especially to the Protestant quality of humanising it: that man is universal and one must not kill out of differences in the mind. Shakespeare grew up as a boy and when he was of Bar Mitzvah age, when he was 13, one of the travelling groups, not of the missionaries from Rome and not of the London playwrights, the first group of playwrights was the father of Richard Burbage who became a co-owner with Shakespeare of theatre that became world famous called The Globe. The thing that Shakespeare saw at 13 was a travelling show of mechanical wonders and one of them was a dolphin with a boy, Arion, riding on the back of this dolphin that was put into a lake formed of the Avon river - that southern part of the Avon, there is a bank side there and it's actually called the [Weir Ridge 1.18.20]. Standing on Weir Ridge, Shakespeare at 13 saw in this pond made that Arion riding on the bank of the dolphin was miraculously saved because the dolphin had come to rescue him, he was thrown into the water to be drowned but the dolphin was sent by God to save him. And so that the powers of a Jonah-esque inside out quality came to impress Shakespeare that there was a true, deep, divine magic in the world and that even a certain death could be transmuted into a magical life and that what this was was a marriage of man and God. More next week.