History 1

We arrive today at History 1 which will give us the most difficult of all of the phases, of the eight phases, of our learning. The nature beginning phase seems easiest but, in retrospect because it's the basis of how we're able to imagine, it is the fundamental field out of which comes existence and also the symbolic mind. So there is a kind of not deception but there is an ability to skew and the skew comes in the way in which experience flows. Our first phase was nature, to develop the field out of which everything emerges, and we used something very ancient and something fairly contemporary. We used the I Ching from China going back some 5,000 years in its origins to FuHsi and NuGua, who were from the north central Asia area, a mountainous area - the Tian Shan mountains are extremely rugged and high - and they were originally, 3,000 BC, from that area that had cognate contacts throughout central Asia and up into what is today Siberia. We paired with the I Ching one of the most natural contemporary figures: Henry David Thoreau. And we began with The The Natural Man and A Natural Wisdom to develop the field of nature. And we saw in the ritual phase, the second phase, how the emergence out of nature is always coherent. So that whatever emerges has a thusness about its unity, not only are things whole but the combination of those wholes add up to make further unities. And so the Chinese designation, anciently, was that out of Tao comes Tê, the power to be, the actuality of it and that is not a dead actuality, it s not a static actuality, but it's vibrant so that it constantly re-emerges. And that re-emergence is quality of matter, that it has a vibration, it's related to a frequency, a wave, but when that frequency, when that wave, becomes polarised electromagnetically it registers, then, as matter. But matter is convertible back to the energy dynamic and so Tao and Tê are related together and the Tê is the actuality of it, which is vibrant, and thus, at the deepest level of existence is the power of something to continually emerge in its vitality. And so natural things are vital, they have the energy polarised into the vitality of it but that vitality can be released back into energy so that sun light can now become green leaves which, if eaten, will release that energy back to the eaters and one begins to have an ecology, a cycle. And we saw that the action, the karma, the action of what we do has an existential tenacity to it: it doesn't stick to something but characterises it. And the characterisation of it comes through the flow of experience and the characterisation is put into images, is put into feelings, is put into language. So that the ancient term in Sanskrit for a language, vak, means that by saying something, exactly, you bring the vitality into the consonance of the participation with the natural field and it develops a referentiality for the real object as it actually vitally is and at the same time balances in the mind so that the symbol of it, the image in the imagination, the meaning in the idea, the cognate order of a grammar or a syntax, that the symbolic thought structure will have a natural referentiality to what you're talking about. But experience, in its flow, is only able to keep its health when it flows through the natural field and so the whole quality of a mythic phase is to keep it participatory in nature. If our experience, our mythos, if our images and feelings and language are participating within the actual field of nature then the rituals and the symbols will be cognate, they'll have a referentiality, they will be aligned. And the alignment will always produce a directness in every language. Human beings for all time have said such things are then true. But they are true not because someone defines them and then the definition confers a truth, it's because they are trued, in the alignment, that the function of experience and nature are consonant in their dynamic and thus the referentiality of things and their mental symbols are trued because of that consonance. And when consciousness comes into play as a higher dynamic, higher in the sense that we have explored in the vision phase, that differential consciousness actually, in its particular field, constitutes a fifth dimension, a quintessential not addition to time and space - the four dimensions - but a transformative fifth dimension as if one now adds a thumb to the four fingers of the hand and the natural dimensions now have an ability to be creative and to also remember. When little children are first learning to exercise their remembering, not just memory as a content but remembering as a function, they start by counting on their fingers. And ten now becomes an index for the ordinal ordering of things. And in just this natural way, visionary consciousness as a fifth dimension, as a creative recognition field, merges with nature and now the emergence into existence becomes, as we say, magical, it becomes alchemical. But that the basis of it was the median basis of the mysteriousness of experience, that experience can engender a flow of images that will register in the imagination, a flow of feelings that will register in the heart of the mind, a flow of language that will register in the idea. The Greek term idea meant a form in the symbolic mind. And all of this is transformable by consciousness. Then we saw that there is an exchange between the visionary field of consciousness and the structure of the mind and what exchanges is that the imagination, which is a structure of a form in the mind, becomes a creative function in vision. So that visioning something, now, has a creative imaginative dynamic to it which is one of the sources of art. And so the forms that will come out of that five dimensional conscious time space, those forms will be art forms and one of the most significant art forms of all is the person, distinct from the individuality which is an idea in the mind, distinct from the referential to the existential ritual actions that one does so that the individuality in symbols, when it is referentially active in alignment with the physical existentiality, we then say this is an identity. So that the individuality, the identity of the individuality with the physical ritual action being, all of this is available now to emerge as a person which is a six dimensional form. It is emerged out of a complex quintessential field which is natural and conscious, not at the same time but one, now, has to expand because it isn't just time, it's conscious time, it isn't just space, it's conscious space. So what we say of that, that the forms now occur in an aesthetic space, an art space, and a special spirit time. So that the spirit, as a conscious time, which is unlimited, is not only infinite but also eternal and at the very same logical designation is also completely a perfect zero, a perfect fullness, a perfect infinity, an eternal. And so the spiritual person is an art form, the art of person making, the art of person engendering. And once a person has been able to manifest themselves, as a six dimensional conscious space time person, they are able to engender a very powerful flow of consciousness which is really what history, in its actual occurrence, is. It isn't just that people make history, or people make events and the record of that is history, it's that history is the kaleidoscopic consciousness that is the flow, now, that flows within the field of vision. One of the most difficult things to understand is history and it is the most difficult of all the phases of our learning cycle but it is the most necessary because the forms of science emerge out of the kaleidoscopic flow of historical experience and without the forms of science we do not have a way of being real with the cosmos. We can have a mental alignment with a physical aggregate called the universe but it will be a symbolic understanding of identity whereas the actual harmonic of the cosmos requires that our spirit person, our art of being, is able to have its resonances arranged in all possible combinations and sets so that the harmonics, now, are capable of several very interesting aspects. One is that they can develop an analytic of any degree and specificity which can be put out theoretically first and conformed by experiments so that history is actually experience that has an added transform of experiment. One can now theorise and then experiment to see how this turns out in all of its varieties and then come to a scientific form. It's important for us because the cosmos is not static, it is not dead and once someone has the intuition that comes through as their spirit person the cosmos calls out to us because we are now cognate with it. This is not an identity but rather it is a harmonic and one sense that your spirit person is at home in a cosmos of all possible worlds and the eight dimension cosmos, having emerged out of a seven dimension kaleidoscopic consciousness we call history, that eight dimensional cosmos has a very special hyper space that comes into play, another three dimensions of space. But those three dimensions of space don't just add to the eight and then make an eleven, string theory is a theory that is still symbolically rooted will have eleven dimensions but the play is not that that hyper space of that extra three dimensions is added to the eight but rather the cosmos, in this way, creates the ability for the original three dimensions of space to have their hidden seed so that whenever time occurs, the original space will blossom out of that movement, that first dimension of time. So that the three dimensions of a hyper space are hidden, they're invisible. They're not only invisible to light, they're invisible to superlight, they're invisible electromagnetically and they're invisible magneto electrically as well. Dark matter will always have an ability to be calculated analytically from the eight dimensions but dark energy cannot be calculated at all because it exceeds the ability for an analytic to either appreciate or analyse because it comes into play not only mysteriously and magically but, using the language cognate now, in a hyper way. It re-emerges originally and begins the entire ecology, fresh, spontaneous. One of the characteristics of our kind, and it's been the case now for many thousands of years, was to find a way to put the sets together so that history could be understood in terms of periodicities because the ritual comportment was always in terms or rhythms, always in terms of comportments that could be counted. And so the periods of history are one of the ancient techniques of beginning to be wise about kaleidoscopic conscious dynamics. We're going to take our method of taking not just ideas or experiences or rituals but of taking the book which is the way in which symbolic completion of the natural square of attention was given a transparency. The book is a transparent symbol. If you read the book you do not look at the ink, you look at the shapedness in order to let the flow of visionary experience come out of it. When you teach little children how to read, they already have a very natural consciousness that is visionary and it takes them a while to fit into the clothing of doing it through a book when they learn to read. And when they learn to read there's kind of a joy and the joy is not that they have discovered something new but they have discovered a new way to try on what they already are doing. And so for them reading is a play, it's play, it's fun. And the beginning of reading is that one can point to the pictures and one can read the words and they meld together so that they get the knack of making pictures while they read and able to do this by the end of the first grade. They get a great joy out of being able to show you that they can play with these words and that the pictures come alive. And for them they are alive in their creative imagining, in their visioning. And if this is developed in a creative way [22.56 MUSIC from mobile phone] ...the music of the universe will come in right on time and we will have this beautiful quality. By the way, that little riff was a theme of a movie called Journey to the Centre of the Earth, a long time go Jules Verne's novel, with James Mason and Pat Boone of all people. You might take it up and you'll see. And when they went into the wonders of the centre of the earth this kind of musical riff would play, that was the musical score of it. The cultivation is the way in which experience will flow but when experimental experience flows you now have civilisation so that history is the dynamic of civilisation just as myth is the dynamic of culture. As a culture will have its traditions, a civilisation will have its history. And so a historical dynamic is enormously complex and requires a very special kind of expansion: the expansion is that the symbol and the art align in the sense that the art, now, is prismatic. Rather than being in an alignment with it, geometrically, the lens of the artistic person is a prism opening out a spectrum. And so one of the earliest symbols that was indicating that this occurs is the rainbow. And the rainbow is a very special symbol because it showed that only the spirit person is able to see the full spectrum, is able to see that the light is colourful, that the universe is not just illuminated or animated but that the cosmos is in living colour. And so the artist who is a spirit person will now use a different kind of language: instead of using a rhetorical language that has referentiality aligned in identities, logically, now the language will be a poetic. Whether it is written as poetry or prose is actually a mental distinction that doesn't' apply, all artistic language is a poetic and extends not only to a written language of words but to colours, to movements, to all forms. So that now all of the arts - dance, sculpture, painting, architecture - they are all using a poetic. And to appreciate requires not only being able to appreciate the art of the art work but also being an appreciator, of being somewhat alerted as a spiritual person yourself. So that the work of art now is a very special kind of prismatic form that when put into consonance with the prismatic form of your appreciative art of spirit person, now you have two lensings which give you the telescopic quality of extending it out to any expansion. And, also, the microscopic pairing of those prisms so that one can go into detail, any detail whatsoever, whatever you wish to have. All this time the book, as a transparent symbol, was for 2,000 years the way in which the mind founded its symbolic order. We're now in a completely new time form and so we're transcending the book but in a special way that is consonant with what has gone on before so that we do not lose the heritage. Now we're pairing books and we use pairs of books like a tuning fork and every moon cycle we change them. We use a pair of books for four presentations, for a month, and then we go to another pair and then another pair so that eventually we will have a whole set of pairs of books that are like the tuning forks that a piano tuner would use, would come in and with 88 keys one has eleven octaves. And so you have a whole set of tuning forks to make sure the entire instrument is tuned. This is a learning to tune all of the dimensions of which we are capable. Previously, this kind of yoga was only available in very, very rare places by very rare individuals and usually only one at a time. The original pattern in India before the so-called Aryan invasion, the original Indians had a life cycle that included if someone had lived long enough to have been a householder, raised a family, had their life and were still alive, they had the right to choose to go and excerpt themselves from the culture, to excerpt themselves from the tradition and to go into the jungles, into a little hermitage hut or go into the Himalayas to a cave perhaps. And so the original Rishis were those older individuals that had completed the cycle of nature and were now ready for the adventure of consciousness in whatever expansion that ecology would have. And, when one looks at the original Vedas, like the Rigveda about 3,500 years ago, one sees that those Vedas are not treatises but that they are poems that are raised to a very high quality when put together as a composition. And so you have the poet seers like [Angarisis 31.02] and Yājnavalka where you have, now, the ability to raise a poetic almost asymptotically so that one is not only making a poetry but one is making an ecology of poetry called a poetic and out of this will come what used to be called in wisdom a sacred history. All history is sacred when it is engendered by the spirit person. We're taking a periodicity that became conspicuous 2,000 years ago. It had been in effect for a very long time, for more than 2,000 years before that. We're taking the Cycle of the Phoenix as a way of giving us a 500 year set and to arrange pairs of those phoenix cycles so that they make a millennia and then pairing those millennia so that they make an aeon [aion], 2,000 years, four cycles of the phoenix. And we're taking in particular the previous 2,000 year aeon [aion] before our own to begin history and we're taking it east and west. The original way in which that phoenix cycle was expressed was in the first century of the Common Era, the first century AD. The year in which the Cycle of the Phoenix became conspicuous to everyone was 36, 36 AD. The most famous of all the designations of it was 33BC by Tacitus. One of the pairs of books that we're using to begin history is Tacitus' Annals of Imperial Rome and Thucydides' the Peloponnesian War. The Greeks and the Romans because there's 500 years, there's a Cycle of the Phoenix between these two. This is the first conscious history; this is the first time that the conscious history was put into a complete set. So, between roughly the 400s BC and the 100s AD, in that Cycle of the Phoenix what has a very peculiar quality to it which has its roots going back deeply into Egypt and India and Mesopotamia and has a cognate structure with China and the far east which is cognate and related to the central Asian ancient Zarathustrian cycle. We're going to start with Tacitus because Tacitus gives us the first description, the other Roman historians, one of them was Dio Cassius, his nine volume history of Rome is published by Harvard in the Loeb classical library and also Pliny whose ten volume Natural History is also published in the Loeb Harvard edition. The Tacitian presentation of it is in a chapter called The Reign of Terror and in order to understand this without interruption we're going to take a little break. One of the things that characterises the Greeks and the Romans is that they were both unable to navigate the flow of history. And not only did the Greek experience end up in a tremendous violent chaos that lasted for centuries, the Roman experience, which was an even larger form of it, has ended up in a chaos that has lasted, now, for two millennia. We inherit, wherever we live on the planet, a great deal of this confusion. The confusing matrix extends from Ireland to Ceylon and its complement, like an overtone, extends from central Asia to Japan and down into Indonesia. So that one has a very interesting tai chi, a yin yang, of a broad sweep of civilisations coming up from the south, a broad sweep of civilisations coming down from the north and try to find a way not to be unified - that was the mental flaw - but of find a way for the choreography to be infinite. We live, now, where the planetary culture is secure only when the civilisation is star-system wide. You cannot base a civilisation on something which is cultural. The culture is a nourishment or the civilisation but it is the civilisation that must give it its spectrum, its rainbow. The planet is not capable of a civilisation that is rainbow any longer but the star system is. So our new civilisation will be the stellar civilisation, the entire star system and curiously enough, paradoxically enough, if you were to measure it it would be one light year across, the speed of light over a year is the diameter of our star system. And that star system has a very peculiar membrane which is noticeable now in NASA, it's a mystery. The two Pioneers - Pioneer 10 and 11 -that went up, out, away, from the flat ecliptic of the planets and the moons and all the other aspects of our system and went north and south, they are both far enough out now that they are noticeably slowing down. There's nothing that would slow them down in any kind of a theory except that space time, when it is within a wholeness, will always have an interface which will be the membrane. It will be a permeable membrane, nevertheless it will occur and it is the encounters of Pioneer 10 and 11 with the membrane of our star system, the interface with the interstellar field that is slowing them down. All of this is difficult to approach immediately, we're taking our time and that's why it takes us a while to go through this double cycle. There's much not only to learn but there's everything to recalibrate and that is what we're doing. Let' take a break for about 10 - 15 minutes then we'll come back. Let's come back. And you're looking at a portrait of a women who as mummified about 2,000 years ago in Egypt and you can see that we're talking about human beings indistinguishable from us, on the verge of having - like today's Los Angeles times, it has an audience of Klingons and humans sitting together - we are on the verge of interstellar adventures. There are more civilisations in the cosmos than there are grains of sand in the Ganges but in order to participate with that we must mature and the maturation opening acceptance is that your enabled/unable [1.22] to inhabit your entire star system with a sense of being at home on that scale and that's what we are transforming to, now. We're using Thucydides and Tacitus to begin but we're not going to really tune them in to the sharpness until the fourth presentation. We're going to work our way towards them to try and understand the tremendous amperage, the push, the dynamic of history that made it almost impossible for the Greeks and Romans to understand who they were and what was real and both the Greeks and the Romans failed at this. One of the difficulties 500 years ago, in the Italian Renaissance is that there was a reawakening of antiquity of the Greeks and Romans with a naivety that allowed for all of the anger, greed and lust that destroyed classical civilisation to come back into play again. And in the 20th century we inherited that violent wind almost to our demise. The difficulty now is that this is not only true of the Greeks and Romans it was true everywhere that they touched. One of the most difficult places to understand was the interface in northern India because it had Greek kingdoms for several hundreds of years after Alexander the great and all of India was completely reshaped in Greco-Indo-historical pattern by Chandragupta Maurya. He literally made India into a Hellenistic kingdom, very much like Egypt being a Hellenistic kingdom in the Ptolemies, very much like Persia becoming a Seleucid Hellenistic kingdom, from Seleucus Nicator, and so on. The deepest transform in India was because of Ashoka who was the lowest son from the father who was a son to Chandragupta Maurya. Out of the 50 grandsons of Chandragupta, Ashoka was the one who was least paid attention to because he had splotchy skin, because he had part Greek blood from a mother that had part Greek inheritance. And so he was considered misshapen and not worth being trained as a prince since he had no chance whatsoever of becoming a king. All of his brothers killed each other off through violent family savagery and Ashoka was the only one left alive and he ruled India for 50 years in such a way that he is the only king who ever sat, who disbanded all of his armies. And for 50 years India was ruled by having no standing armies, no police. At every entrance to India there were Ashokan pillars with four lions facing the four directions and the edicts of Ashoka were like the rule of thumb, laws of humanity and spirit that were observed in India. And that was the entire law code. And linking all of those Ashokan pillars were a series of roads that Ashoka made. And these roads were made for the public to utilise and every so often there were rest spots, picnic spots, medicinal herbs and fruit trees. And everything was planted alongside of the concourse of these roads so that one could not only travel in peace and comfort but had the sense of a distribution of wholeness throughout the entire range. And right at the centre of what was at the time a desert area, Ashoka put a building called Sanchi and Sanchi was a stupa that had a very powerful relic of the historical Buddha. And there were four gates, the gates were very, very large and had three curved , like bow, crossbars and at Sanchi the ringing, resonant tone of enlightenment spread out from there along all of the roads, because Sanchi was at the hub of all of the road system to all of the pillar edict opening gates of India. And the entirety of India at this time had the integrity of a dharma bell that has been rung and you could still feel the resonance, although it was a subconscious tone you couldn't hear anymore you could still feel it. One of the qualities of the sacredness of the cow, of cattle, is that they were able to be calm enough to give milk and it was like a symbol that the resonance of truth is still felt, even in the animals, even in the land. We're about to have a new civilisation where the bell that we're going to ring is our sun because it already is ringing: the sun takes a million years for its core energy to percolate up to a very top layer and that top layer has millions of convection spouts, like little energy tornadoes, and that carries the energy out and makes starlight, makes the sunlight. So the light that comes to us, though it takes eight minutes to come from the surface of the sun, it already has been a million years slowly percolating up so that it is always an ancient light. We will have that kind of quiet resonance by the end of the 21st century, everywhere that we wish to go. Let's come to the Cycles of the Phoenix. This is what Tacitus, who was the greatest roman historian, he had the reputation of being the most completely accurate historian and Tacitus' Latin is famous for students learning to translate it, it's infamous. His Latin has the bluntness of a professional boxer who will not let up; his syntax is famous for presenting not brutally but constantly the shortest most accurate way to talk about who, where, what and when. And he says, It was now at the conclusion of an age long cycle that the phoenix appeared in Egypt; a remarkable event which occasioned much discussion by Egyptian and Greek authorities and will indicate the facts on which there is agreement and certain others which are doubtful but not wholly fantastic. The phoenix is sacred to the sun. Those who have depicted it agree that its head and markings of its plumage distinguish it from all other birds. Regarding the length of its life, accounts vary. The commonest view favours 500 years but some estimate that it appears every 1,461 years and that the three last seen flew to Heliopolis in the reigns of Sesostris, Amasis and Ptolemy III [of the Macedonian dynasty respectively] escorted by numerous ordinary birds, astonished by its unfamiliar aspect. It's earliest appearances are unverifiable but, since between Ptolemy and Tiberius there were less than 250 years so, if denied the authenticity of the Tiberian phoenix which did not, they say, come from Arabia or perform the attested traditional actions for when its years are complete and death is close it is said to make a nest in its own country and shed over it a procreative substance from which rises a young phoenix. Its first function after growth is the burial of its father. This is habitually done as follows: after proving itself by a long journey, it takes up its father's body and carries it to the altar of the sun and burns it. The details are disputed and embellished by myths but that the bird sometimes appears in Egypt is unquestioned. Dio Cassius, who wrote later - Tacitus lived from 56 AD to about 120 AD - Dio Cassius a little later and he described that the bird, the phoenix is actually a very rare kind of Chinese pheasant, originally, from north China near the Amur river which is the current boundary between Siberia and Manchuria, that this Chinese pheasant had migrated through central Asia, had migrated over the Iranian plateau and had come to be adapted in southern Arabia, what is today Yemen. And there its particular plumage, in China, it had a gold ring around the neck and the plumage was a dark blue with an even darker indigo long tail feathers and a peculiar kind of feather array on top and very long legs and claws and huge wings. You can trace this because the Chinese and the ancient Iranians share the pairing of a mythological couple, the dragon and the phoenix. Both in China and in ancient Iran you will find dragons and phoenixes, you will not find dragons in Arabia but you will find the phoenix there and you do not find dragons in Egypt but you find the phoenix there. The dragons split off, the phoenix went south, the dragons went North West. So that you will find dragons following the ancient Celtic routes through ancient northern Europe all the way to the Scottish-Irish-British lands who do not have the phoenix, they only have the dragons. The only dragon that managed to come into the southern western realm was in Ethiopia. There was a tradition because the Ethiopians had trade concourse with India for millennia. One of the things that we're going to understand in history, in this presentation of history, is the enormous new spread of understanding. The earliest trade routes with India were through Mesopotamia and the Mesopotamian trade routes were cemented by a very great ruler named Sargon of Akkad. By 2350 BC, 900 years before the Rigveda, there were trade routes that linked Mesopotamia, along the shipping routes don through the Persian gulf, along the coast of what is today Iran and Pakistan into the Indus civilisation of India, at this time an enormously capable civilisation. Mohenjo-daro was more than half a million people 4,000 years ago and they had terracotta clay sewer systems and water systems when places like London were not even thought of. And the far northern complement to Mohenjo-daro, Harappa, was also about a half million people and had direct trade route connections through the Himalayas into central Asia. And this is how the dragon imagery had a little thread that came south and lodged itself in Ethiopia so that the British national hero, St George, who conquers the dragon, the origin of St George and the dragon, is in Ethiopia and it is a direct link back to ancient India, pre-vedic India. One of the qualities of pre-vedic India is a kind of permeable mystery mysticism which has a timbre which is distinctly different from the northern indo European timbre. One of the surviving qualities of that mysteriousness is in the music of the ancient desert Deccan of central India. The city that would be at the centre of that is Nagpur. The greatest musician of that whole region, several decades ago, was named Pannalal Ghosh and he played an ancient flute, a wooden flute, almost like an Australian aboriginal didgeridoo: very difficult to get a sound out of it and very difficult to keep it into a melodic line and the only way to do that is that one has to breathe the instrument so that the melodic line, which would exceed the breath if you were just using it to blow out, by breathing the instrument you keep the melodic flow constant. And so you get these very long curlicues of ancient Dravidian Indian music that do not end. They keep on curling, like the fumes of a very rare incense that lend because they evaporate into the air, leaving the perfume of the air. And the ancient high dharma would always talk about a poetic not making sense but perfuming the spirit space. We're learning an ancient wisdom here in a new civilisation guide. The cycle we're looking at today is from about 1400 BC in Egypt to about 900 BC in the origins of classical Greece; the Egyptian is the time of Akhenaten, the Greek is the time of Homer. And so from Akhenaten to Homer is a 500 year Cycle of the Phoenix - Homer was a contemporary of Solomon in the 90s BC. Akhenaten is a heretic king and one of the odd things is that Akhenaten is very, very similar to Ashoka as we were talking about just before the break. This is from Princeton University Press, it's a book on Akhenaten: The Heretic King and D. B. Redford has done a very good [break in tape 21.47] this, he writes, just a few sentences: In contrast t the frequent appearance of his brothers and sisters, Amenophis [which was his name before he became Akhenaten] the second son of Amenophis III. His older brother had died young, as conspicuous by as his absence from the monuments of the father. It may well be that he was intentionally kept in the background because of a congenital ailment that made him almost hideous to behold. The repertoire of Amarna art has made us familiar with the effeminate appearance of the young man: elongated skull, fleshy lips, slanting eyes, lengthened earlobes, prominent jaw, narrow shoulders, potbelly, enormous hips and thighs and spindly legs. Of late, experts have tended to identify his problem with some sort of endocrine disorder with secondary sex characteristics failing to develop. One of the aspects that is there, it's not written about here, the author was unaware, occasionally there is a human being born where the pituitary gland is slightly crimped by its bone casing. In our time, my friend Manly Hall also had this condition. If you are born a little premature and you have this crimped pituitary gland, these kinds of characteristics will literally be the readout of what occurs but what occurs with it also is an attenuation of the dependence on a metaphysical sense of symbols and an actual expansion ,then, on a realistic penetration through whatever symbols there are, ignoring the metaphysics and coming into a direct harmonic. Akhenaten had this and this ability led him to, when he became pharaoh, to reject the fifteen hundred years of traditional Egyptian metaphysics and go directly to the one god who is not the sun but that the sun's disk is the transparent symbol through which the energy of the one god makes life. So that the symbolism was always that every ray of the sun carries an ankh, an Egyptian symbol, looks like the cross only the top of the cross has a loop. It has a loop because this is where one holds the ankh with the two fingers and that this ankh is presented by every ray of the sun to us because of the god behind the transparency of the sun's disc, giving us the energy of life. And that this energy of life can be collected and one of the ways in which it is collected is by what the Egyptians called a Djed pillar. And the Djed pillar was a condenser of energy, it had four discs at the top and the ankh would fit into the top of the Djed pillar which would be able then to condense the electromagnetic energy of sunlight to such an extent that it would charge the ankh which, then, could be lifted out of the Djed pillar and literally presented to someone like a electromagnetic touch and they would receive the concentrated energy of vitality from that. So that the ankh was not a symbol of life, it was the presenter of life energy directly. To only see it as a symbol meant that one stayed in the symbolic thought form which is a complete integral but is not differential at all and life is actually a differential energy capable of expansion. The quality that manifested for Akhenaten was that there was a secret trace, a thread of one god speciality in the Egyptian legacy that had been overlooked for more than 100 years at the time that Akhenaten came into being the pharaoh. The origin of that is Abraham, Abraham who was born in the southern Mesopotamian city, one of the most ancient cities in the world, of Ur and the archaeologist who excavated Ur was sir Leonard Woolley and he did a book on Abraham which was published in 1936 by Faber and Faber in London. Ur was a place where the moon god Nanna, various names in Egypt, Thoth, the moon god was the titulary deity of that city and all of the rituals going back many, many thousands of years were around that particular god. But there were other cities having other gods at the nexus and in fact, by the time of Sargon the great, there were 42 different temple rituals scattered throughout the Euphrates and Tigris river scalars - the Euphrates goes all the way almost over to the Bekaa valley in Syria and up into turkey, the Tigris goes up into what is still turkey today but in ancient times was Armenia. Those 42 different mythologies were linked together like beads on a necklace by Sargon's genius daughter Enheduanna who is the world's first great writer. She wrote the Inanna epics 4,400 years ago, she's the first known writer in the world, she predates Homer by 1,500 years. She's as much before Homer as St Augustine is to us. She not only wrote the Inanna epics but she wrote a series of temple hymns, 42 different temple hymns, where she recast, recalibrated, the mythologies of each temple site and their gods and their rituals into a common poetic that liked them all together as a historical flow of not only unity but of a prismatic splendour. And so the temple hymns of Enheduanna were a way of taking the cultural mythos, pulling it through the symbolic order of the mind, into the field of theoretical visioning and making an art form out of it which could then engender a historical dynamic and flow. And, in this, very successful, not only successful because of uniting all of the gods, all of the rituals of Mesopotamia together but their contacts - it's called the fertile crescent - went all the way to the Mediterranean, all the way to Cyprus, all the way to the silver mountains of ancient Anatolia, all the way to the cedar forests of ancient Lebanon and was the origin of the first cities of the Phoenicians. The first city there was called Ugarit about 4,000 years ago. But their longest trade route was to India, to the Indus river civilisation because there were many things in India that were not obtainable in other places. And one of the places along the way in southern Iran was a source of a very necessary rare metal: tin, because, while you can work with copper, you cannot make bronze unless you mix a little tin with the copper. And to find tin was one of the most rare things in the ancient world, so rare that persons having long caravan routes used to carry quantities of tin to make the baksheesh locally so that they could pass through and continue unmolested. One of the reasons of the Phoenicians of going west, across several thousand miles of the Mediterranean, all the way to Spain, is because in northern Spain, along the Atlantic coast, is a source of tin. A better source of tin was found in a peninsular of France, Brittany, but the largest source of tin was found in the west of England where the shires of Cornwall and Somerset come together. The trade was centred originally by the Phoenicians in Tyre. When Alexandria was made it became the hub of the trade routes of the world and they followed the ancient trade routes to India by going along the canals into the Nile system, down the Nile, across over to the Red Sea, down the Red Sea along the southern coast of Arabia, along the coast of Iran and what is Pakistan today to the Indus valley in India. And extended the trade routes down the cost, the west coast of India, all the way down to Kerala because it was there that you got the finest spices: pepper, cinnamon and so forth. And so the persons who controlled the trade routes going from Alexandria east to southern India were inheritors of the ancient tradition of Sargon of Akkad, of his daughter Enheduanna, of the ancient -because Sargon and Enheduanna were of Semitic language, the Sumerian is not a Semitic language like Akkadian - and Akkadian became the language, the lingua franca of the time, the English of the time but in its colloquial pronunciation it evolved into Aramaic. And so you find that the Aramaic speaking peoples were originally not herds people but caravan runners and the beast for the caravan over the land routes was the black wire haired donkey, not the grey mule but a very tough wiry donkey. And the earliest symbols for the Semitic trade people was the black donkey, the ass. And you find it again in the New Testament, the last time that Jesus enters Jerusalem, before he is crucified and resurrected - you can't kill a spirit - he rides in on an ass to show that the lineage goes completely back for 2,000 years, intact. And that by completing that entire cycle the next cycle will be a higher dimensional transform of it: we're no longer doing what we used to do, for 2,000 years, but we're taking what we used to do and tying it together in such a way that it's a bow which, when pulled open, will yield the present of the new. And that new present was a civilisation that took the aeon [aion] of the divine king and opened it up to a new aeon [aion] that I have given the name to it, many decades ago, of the mysterious person. Our new aeon [aion] here is one of the spiral spirit. There is a quality here that from Abraham, who first came into contact by leaving Ur to go with his father Terah to the northern city of Harran and Harran was a city, like Ur, devoted to the moon god but not just the moon but devoted because Sargon of Akkad was 400 years before Abraham. About as much time between us as Shakespeare is to us. Terah is an Aramaic pronunciation of the moon god's name so that Abraham's father was literally a moon god visionary priest. And because he was visionary, not just a priest for ritual, but he was a visionary religious genius who passed this on to his son Abraham so that Abraham was able to not only have dreams and become a dream master and visions to have a vision but he was able to lens the persons of the spirits so that he could relate to them and talk to them. He could talk to the angelic messengers as persons, a spirit persons, as we would talk to each other here and so they made a very special covenant with him: that this capacity was able to be passed on, once to a son who could pass it on once to a son and establish - in the Vajrayana it's called a lineage - he passed it on to Isaac who passed it on to Jacob who passed it on to his eleventh son Joseph. And it was Joseph who became the dream master, the coat of rainbow coloured, poetic dream master visionary genius who became the person who saved ancient Egypt in a time of seven years of drought, who was given as a wife the daughter f the head priest of Heliopolis, the city of the sun. And whose two sons not only became two of the most powerful Egyptian figures, just under the pharaoh, but they became the inheritors of two special tribes, each one was given a tribe in ancient Israel. The 12 tribes of Israel are not 12 they are 13. There are 12 tribes but Menasseh and Ephraim are two sons of Joseph that constitute two tribes. The 13th tribe were the Levites who were not given a particular land area but were given in charge of tending the temple and its resonances wherever it would be. So they are a tribe that has a spirit land not a geographical land. Akhenaten inherited the Joseph god vision capacity directly and for this the phoenix cycle runs from Abraham to Akhenaten and was able to pass this capacity on in such a way that homer had it as well. This is a little biography of Homer; Paolo Vivante is one of the most charming and delightful of all Homeric scholars of the 20th century. Lost forever? No. Poetry and art in general come to remove, as Coleridge puts it, the film of familiarity that blinds us to the truth and wonder of the world about us. This poetic effect is eminently Homeric, a fresh sense of life and resilience is always brought home to us by letting the image of a thing come into view on the cadence of a verse that does no more than realise in rhythm a basic movement or position [its electromagnetic vibration frequency comes on the language of the poetic: saying makes it so]. The music and the imagery blend with the vocabulary, it is as if a new poetic language came into our ken, here the long shadowed spear finds its place as well as the wing-stretching birds or the robe-trailing women or the taper-leafed olive tree. Each thing singled out in its individuality and yet bearing the mark of a common touch[their spirit presences]. And to be able to hear a poetic is the awakening of the seeds of enlightenment: those who have ears to hear, let them hear. More next week.