History 2
Presented on: Saturday, July 14, 2007
Presented by: Roger Weir
We come to History Two and I wanna jump right in with one of the most famous openings in world literature. These are the opening lines from Aeschylus' Agamemnon. The site is in Argos, in the Greece of 3,000 years ago. Two powerful brothers, Agamemnon and Menelaus, have used their strong arm tactics to marshal all the other Greek kings and kingdoms, to cough up a total of 1,000 ships, to go to Troy and to bring back Menelaus' wife and to simply obliterate the entire kingdom that dared raised a prince, named Paris, who could to think that he could take a Greek power king's wife and not pay for it. And after ten years of war, not of fighting all the time, but of encamping around Troy to inculcate the terror of their vengeance, that 'They will not just pay with defeat and death, but they will learn that the terror that we can inflict is a permanent horror and a warning sign to all other kingdoms. No one will mess with us.' But in exercising that terror, that graduated, vengeant, slow motion decade of killing with nightmarish ferocity, all of the surviving kings had turned into killers. And the people waiting for their return back to the kingdoms were afraid of what was coming back. So the Agamemnon by Aeschylus opens with a watchman:
Of the gods I ask deliverance from this toil, from my year long watch, in which lying at the house of the Atreidae on my arms, dog fashion, I have become familiar with the assembly of stars at night and those bright potentiates, conspicuous in the sky, who bring winter and summer to man. And so now I am watching for the torch signal, the bright gleam of fire, bringing a tale from Troy, the tidings of her capture, for such a manner rules a woman's heart of manly counsel, being full of expectation. And when I keep my couch, that is restless by night and drenched with dew, this couch of mine that no dreams look upon, for instead of sleep, fear stands beside me, that I may not close my eyelids firmly in sleep. And when I have a mind to sing a song, or hum a tune, tapping a sap from a root, this medicine of song against sleep, then I weep and groan over the misfortune of this house, not now as of old, excellently husbanded, but now there may come a happy deliverance from my toil, by the fire of good tidings appearing in the dark.
And Agamemnon comes home and there's a phrase from a twentieth century writer, Nikos Kazantzakis, who when he was young at the beginning of the twentieth century, stood on a beach in Crete and threw stones at the Mediterranean waves, demanding that they make him a god. Wrote a sequel to Homer's Odyssey, The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, beautifully translated into English by Kimon Friar, whom we young students at the University of Wisconsin in the '50's met. The opening line from Kazantzakis, describing someone like an Odysseus or an Agamemnon: 'Thick black blood dripped down from both his murderous palms and with a flick of a thorny eyebrow, he signalled the servants to prepare his bath.' What happens is that the Agamemnon begins one of only two surviving trilogies of Greek tragedies, the Oresteia by Aeschylus being one of the most powerful triplets, trilogies in world literature and of course Sophocles' Oedipus trilogy being the other.
Aeschylus, who ended his long life in southern Sicily, in the Greek colony town of Gela, was more proud of his military record than he was of the fact that he wrote 90 Greek tragedies and was considered the father of Greek tragedy. His tombstone read: 'Here lies Aeschylus, who fought at Marathon and the long-haired Persians can still tell of their defeat.' The difficulty for the Classical Greeks that came into the world stage in a very big way with the generation of Aeschylus...he was born 525 BC, lived until the mid-450's BC and it was that generation that set everything going. An exact contemporary of Aeschylus is Pindar, who is the greatest literary poet of classical antiquity. But they were the first generation that was able to grow up and mature, because the Greek ethos had a completely new quality of enormous scope and of tremendous amperage. The scope was because it was in the maturity of the great teaching of Pythagoras, which was fresh and dynamic and new and at the very same time the ancient heritage of Homer was brought back and placed at the centre of the education of young Greek men. Especially in Athens, where anyone growing up, grew up in an education system that was spinal columned, skeletal boned, based on Homer. So the presentation today is called From Homer to Pythagoras and we're not only talking about the 500 year period that that inscribes, which is a Cycle of the Phoenix, as we have been talking about, but that that Cycle of the Phoenix comes full round, so that the power of Homer and the power of Pythagoras occur together at the very origins, where Greece, that had there been there for a very long time, found the accelerator pedal and popped it into overdrive. And in the next 100 years, from 499 to 399 BC, the Classical Greeks went through a force-fed cycle that almost obliterated them. And so devastating was the slow realisation of the truly horrific, repetitive human grinding that they had gotten themselves in, that the most literate General of the day, Thucydides, sat down in exile...like almost everyone else who was sensitive, had been spit out by the ferocity of the tyrannies that had come to rule the roost. And he wrote the first really great history, called The Peloponnesian War, which we are taking as one of our pairs of books and I like in particular the translation of Rex Warner and we're using Rex Warner. Now, the Penguin Classics edition that I've been using for almost 30, 40 years, when it first came out in the 1960's, late 1954 and I ran across it about 1960, it was replaced in 1972 by a new edition of it, Rex Warner again, but they took out all of the descriptive section heads, so that one now reads it in magazine fashion rather than in the intense, historical presentation which it really is. Thucydides was a contemporary, an early contemporary, of writers like Euripides and when we had our Myth section, our Myth phase of our learning, we took Euripides' last great tragedy, The Bacchae, written when he was in his early seventies, in exile as well. The difficulty is highlighted when you find studies like this, Man in his Pride, published by the University of Chicago Press, sub-entitled, A Study in the Political Philosophy of Thucydides and Plato. Because one of the contemporaries of Thucydides and Euripides was Socrates, who was put to death by the state, put to death by the rulers of the city of Athens, for doing two unforgiveable crimes. He taught the young men to question the gods of the state and he taught the young men to question the forms of political power and for this he was ordered to drink hemlock, a poison. And the only reprieve for him would have been if he had confessed to having desecrated the state in these two important ways, which he refused to do. The Agamemnon resurfaced again and again and again in especially Western planetary history and one of the great editions of it, not just the Agamemnon, but The Choephori and The Eumenides, so that the whole trilogy was reissued, retranslated, re-presented, right after World War One, because it was a devastating thing to realise that World War One was a scenario like the Peloponnesian War all over again. The translator in 1920, who was just superior, was Gilbert Murray and he says something interesting about language in Aeschylus. 'The sense of'...this is 1920. He was doing the translation all during World War One.
The sense of difficulty and indeed of awe, with which a scholar approaches the task of translating the Agamemnon, depends directly on its greatness as poetry. It is in part a matter of diction. The language of Aeschylus is an extraordinary thing, the syntax stiff and simple, the vocabulary obscure, unexpected and steeped in splendour. Its peculiarities cannot be disregarded, or the translation will be false in character, yet not Milton himself could produce it in English. The same great music and a translator who should strive ambitiously to represent the complex effect of the original, would clog his own powers of expression and strain his instrument to breaking.
The same was said of Pindar, that Pindar's poetry was so precipitous in its acrobatic grammar, so flashingly blinding in the way in which its syntax seared images permanently into your imagination and with the kind of - as Homer called them, 'Winged words' - the whole sense of meaning suddenly took off, like great eagle lifting you off the earth, into the wild blue yonder. The great [16:56 C.N. Borer] wrote of a new translation of Pindar in his time in the 1940's, criticising it and he said, 'One should not take an eagle for short walks on a leash.'
It is not possible to convey consciousness without a poetic. A rhetorical, bound language is permanently tethered to the integral brain, the integral mind. It has to be, because its whole sense of referentiality is related to an alignment of referentiality and the alignment is classically stated some 4,000 years ago by Zarathustra: 'Thought, word and deed.' In order for your thought to make sense to you, its order must be referential to the ritual actions of existential things in their definiteness, in the referential equatableness, so that one can make an identification. And in-between those ritual things, ritual acts and that symbolic structure in the mind, the language must convey the identity, the referentiality, in order to make sense. So that when you talk about feeling, when you talk with images, when you use a communication, languages, even to tell stories, it must follow a plot, it must have a beginning, it must have a middle and it must have an end. And once you have that syllogistic stylisation of it, it's very difficult to see clearly that the abstract structure of that making sense is 'A equals A.' Where the A of what you do and of what you compound and say is here, with the A of the clear idea that you have, that references back to that thing and that action and that the language in-between has an equal sign stamped on every single aspect of its meaningfulness. Once that is established and held, it has a natural, electromagnetic clutch mechanism, where you cannot let go of it without losing your sense of identity. Because you become invested in that process, in that referentiality, in that imagery, in that abstract order, that this is who you are, of who you must be and it comes out with great pride, 'I am what I am,' says Papa, 'I am what I am and I'll beat you up if you don't behave.' This scenario fears consciousness and styles it as something magical, that is irrational and that you better be careful if you dabble with it. And so in order to dabble with it in a way that is permissible, it must have a ritual basis, ritual magic. It must have a referentiality to symbolic order and it must put a parentheses very clearly, at beginning and end, on the whole flow of the methos of the experience, of the feelings, of the images. And so there is a special decompression chamber to allow little glimpses of consciousness into the structure of thought, where it indeed now frozen in that order. 'And that decompression chamber is that it is not you who are conscious, it is due to the fact that we've gifted you with a nice civilisation and that's why you're available to these things, so you better tow our lines and we've given you, you know, a little bit of gift here.' That moments of consciousness are just like moments of insight. They're fleeting, as fleeting as an orgasm in the midst of a long life. Those moments may be significant, but they're significant only because you fit into a life that allows for these little speckles of spice to occur. But consciousness is a differential field as extensive as nature in its total field and has the capacity, like any field, to emerge waves, frequencies of energy, in such a way that they will weave and when they weave, they will bring in qualities that are extraordinary. From nature, the weaving happens because of polarity, but in consciousness the weaving happens because of complementarity and so you get a different fabric. If you cut a shape of someone out of the field of nature, their ritual shape will be a figure of what they do, of what they look like, of what they say they are, what we say they are. But if you try to cut a figure out of the field of differential consciousness, it will become so fleeting because there are any number of figurations that can be brought into play and so what you end up with is millions of possibilities of figuration. And the methos of the experience in the integral, which configures the figurations, so that they begin to take on a character which has qualities of feeling, qualities of imagery, qualities of language, distinctive actions, distinctive physiological, practical concerns, now, instead of that kind of a configuration, that kind of a flow, a definite, differential, jewelled form of the spiritual person emerges. And the person will not be able to be stuffed into a ritual figure, will take the configuration of experience and bring it through the symbolic order of the mind, into the field of consciousness and produce a life that is personally interesting and not just figured, not just having a character and not just having the individuality of how your integral thought put it all together. That one of the most famous studies of Thucydides, published by Cambridge University Press some while back ... H.G. Westlake was Professor of Greek at Manchester, 1968, Individuals and Thucydides. And what we notice right away is for the very first time on the planet, a historian understood the difference between king lists, which are ritual action chronologies, understood that the mythic experiences were just the first beginnings of what was going to be formed and would have to go through a special transformation and the transformation was getting the order that the mind had put on experience, to open itself up to the transformation of further possibilities. And that history was an even greater dynamic, differential dynamic, than is visionary consciousness, because historical consciousness is kaleidoscopic. And the kinds of forms that come out of historical consciousness are civilisations and cosmoses. Not the gods, God. And so there is a deep peculiarity that once historical consciousness has really become achievable, one now has an extraordinary wariness, especially when it is freshly new, because it will be all over again freshly susceptible to be considered the enemy of authority. And so at the beginning of all great civilisations, they are begun secretly. You don't read about them, you don't hear about them, unless you search it out, because the generators of it are doing it as quietly real as they can. When the Pythagoras, Homer beginnings of Classical Athens were first promulgated, it looked like Solon the great lawgiver had gone to Egypt and had brought back the plum and the triumph and Athens was going to be one of the greatest kingdoms of all-time, because it would just take the essence of the superior dynasties in Egypt, the superior qualities and would put it through the new Greek, Homer, Pythagorean freshness. And a very canny political master, named Peisistratos, set up the whole political, educational, social situation, so that there weren't just aristocratic families, but that delegates that were going to work together in a new way, like an oligarchy, would be able to use a very interesting kind of idea, which could not be put into practice, but would be talked about by the oligarchy, called a democracy. But they were not interested in democracy, they were interested in selling, in marketing the idea of democracy, so that the oligarchy could take credit and stay in power that way. The easiest way to make the distinction is in the notes and I've written it out this way so that you can hear it straightforward and get why we live in the times that we live in. 'In a democracy the executive privilege is to serve the people well. In a tyranny the people serve the privilege of the executive.' It's as clearly distinct as that. What happens is that a democracy is not a political form, it is an aesthetic form. It is not based on economics, it's based on community. It has a differential quality that is not limited by referentiality. Even the entire cycle of thought, word and deed, there have been tyrannies that have commandeered 100 per cent of thought, word and deed. Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Imperial Japan, the struggle here in America, thought, word and deed. The most powerful expansion success of this was the Roman Empire at its founding. And so, paired with Thucydides, we're taking the master historian of the Roman Empire, Tacitus. We're taking the Annals. Tacitus' Histories, they're all truncated because very, very special significant chapters were x'd out and lost conveniently a long time ago. And each time that Thucydides and Tacitus...which make another Cycle of the Phoenix, another 500 year cycle, so that next week's presentation will be another Cycle of the Phoenix, Thucydides to Tacitus, from the tyranny in Greece to the tyranny in Italy, in Rome. And when it was resurrected, when there was a renaissance of the Greeks and the Romans in the Italian Renaissance, one found again that the pattern wove itself exactly as if to specification. And everyone knows that Machiavelli's The Prince is one of the most devastating presentations of that and his contexts for it, are his Discourses on the Roman historian Livy, whose History of Rome came before, just before Tacitus and it was Livy's History of Rome that was utilised by Julius Caesar. And Augustus Caesar got the Caesars to make Rome the crème de la crème of empires. And Tacitus...and Thucydides is the General who records first-hand the devastating effect on everybody, that no one was safe from being a victim and an executioner at the same time. They turned into killers, even of themselves. The Roman oligarchy, the Roman aristocracy, considered it the utmost Roman gravitas to commit suicide if you were no longer of use to the state. And they found very easy way to do this: you climb into a nice hot bath, drawn by a very obedient servant and you slit your wrists and you bleed in your nice, warm tub, into a quiet death.
We're living in a time, today, Saturday morning, July 14th, when it is claimed that executive privilege overrules the privilege to serve the people well. This never stands and will not stand. Now, this presentation quality is usually not made despondent, but it is difficult to teach, to guide, the navigation of kaleidoscopic consciousness without your realising. By not doing this since the capacity is already engendered, ensures a massive regression. And the regression happens like an avalanche, in less than a generation and it will take hundreds of years, centuries, just to come back up to par and to move forward will take a couple of those long cycles and they were called millennia. We're looking at a cycle that not only moves from Homer to Pythagoras, but there was a cognate person at the same time as Homer, an exact contemporary of him and that was Solomon, the historical King Solomon. And Solomon had a very, very difficult time, because he was the Odyssey of Homer and his father was the Iliad of Homer, King David. And King David was like Agamemnon, or Achilles: he was a magnificent General to win whatever battle you had to win and he was a magnificent warrior in that he was tirelessly the leader, all the time, every time. And produced, magnificently, a couple of sons, who were very good warriors, who were very good generals and wanted to be king as to push their dad aside because he was getting old. The first was beautiful, powerful Absalom, who being warned that his big, beautiful, powerful son was going to flick him off the living map, King David fled with a few loyal retainers. He fled out of his city, Jerusalem, the City of David, down the road that went down to the Dead Sea, to where the Jordan River enters the Dead Sea and across a ford. That ford that he crossed is where the John the Baptist was doing his baptising and baptised Jesus, exactly there on that spot, for exactly the same reason. And King David fled across the ford and about 12 miles beyond that is Mount Nebo, which is the closest that Moses ever got to the Holy Land. And it is from Mount Nebo that you can see down to the Dead Sea, you can see the Jordan Valley as far up as Jericho and you can see the high ridge where the future of Jerusalem and Bethlehem were going to be. And it was there that the old King David, in his seventies, said a prayer and in answer to the prayer the beautiful old prophet Nathan came to him and said:
It is not the beautiful, powerful Absalom, it is not Adonijah, who is going to be king. Your son, your second son, the first one having died as an awful expiation because you had sinned. You had her husband killed so you could have her, could have Bathsheba. But your second son with her, Solomon, he will be the king and a very special king.
Nathan said to him, 'You have killed too much. Your hands are not able to build the temple, but Solomon, your son, will build the temple and he will be the wisest man of his time.' We're gonna take a break and we'll come back to Homer, Solomon and their meeting in the personality of Pythagoras.
Let's come back to our consideration that our enquiry has a graduated quality to it and that quality is that there are 12 presentations that make a phase and then there's an interval and then we reiterate with another phase and articulate with another interval. And we do this over a double year cycle, eight times. This conveys something that is extraordinarily important and was understood in many ways in wisdom traditions, but the first time that the complete bow was tied was by Pythagoras, about 2500 years ago. This highly technical study of Pythagoras, published in 1972, about the last time the edition of Rex Warner's Thucydides Penguin Classic was still intact. Published by Harvard University Press, by Walter Burkert. All of his books are in German, he's a great German scholar and he must have eight or nine that are out now. This is called Law and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism. And on page 369 he talks about Pythagorean musical theory. 'It is a striking paradox,' he writes:
That music, which is the most spontaneous expression of psychic activity, at the same time admits, or rather even challenges, the most rigorous mathematical analysis. There are two systems by which the division of the tonal continuum may be described and the distinction between natural and tempered tuning follows from them.
So that there is a continuum of sound which is able...because the sound is a frequency of energy and that a frequency of energy will have an oscillation in its continuum and will register there. And if you squeeze the oscillation on sound it will be a little higher, if you lengthen it, it will be a little lower. And that in fact the audible sound spread is a window out of the energy oscillation of the frequency of electromagnetic energy. That the longest sine waves of them would be like radio waves and the shortest would be like microwaves and that somewhere within that enormous scalar, there is a sense window, there's a frame, a square of attention, for sound and for sight, for smell, taste, for touch, even for kinaesthetic balance. So that sense always has an attention frame and that the four square is actually an integral which holds primordially and yet translates at the same time as a cycle, a circle. If you do a certain periodicity with sound, with music, you will get a scale of tones, which as we talked about a couple of presentations ago, that the tone will always not just be the tone, but will have an overtone and will have an auxiliary overtone that is subconscious. The first overtone will give a kind of timbre, will give a richness to the tone. The same tone on a stringed instrument will be different from percussion or a horn, but there is another way in which that periodicity can be marked off and that is by ratios, by proportions. He writes, Burkert:
One can think of the interval in a spatial metaphor and equal intervals as representing equal distances or lines. Then greater intervals are made up of the sums of the smaller ones. The standard unit is the tone or step, the difference between a fourth and a fifth. It can be subdivided at will. A fourth then comprehends two and a half whole tones, a fifth, three and a half and an octave six. The usual divisions of the tetrachord in Classical Greek music are, in the diatonic genus or scale: semitone, whole tone, whole tone. In the chromatic: semitone, semitone, tone and a half. And in the enharmonic: quarter tone, quarter tone, diatone. The image of a line and its divisions is especially natural for us because of our familiarity with the piano keyboard and of our system of musical notation, but the Greeks used this image too, as shown even by the word they use for 'Interval,' 'Diastema.' A different system results from the recognition that the harmonic intervals can be expressed as numerical ratios. This can easily be illustrated by the length of vibrating strings, or sounding pipes. It has been known for a long time that pitch depends on the rate of vibration and simple whole tone ratios of frequencies result in the musical concords. The ratio for the octave is two to one, for the fifth, three to two, for the fourth, four to three. Addition of intervals results in multiplication and subtraction results in division of the numerical ratios. To have half an interval means the extraction of a square root. In the terminology of modern mathematics, the intervals through the length of line correspond to the logarithms of the respective ratios. To this extent the two descriptive systems are equally accurate and can be converted into each other.
One of the most powerful of the remembered sayings of Pythagoras...and they were so famous that they used the Ancient Greek term, 'Ipse dixit,' 'He said' and the 'He' was always Pythagoras. One of the things he said, 'Geometry is history.' There is not just a shape to history which is ritual based and symbolically referentialled, but that that geometria has the ability to be brought forth into a sphericality, so that one now gets a trigonometric shaping, which is now a trigonometric shaping of what? Not of things, not of reference for symbols, but it a shaping of functions and functional relationalities, of coefficients of the sine and cosine, of the energy dynamic which is now given its trigonometric shapedness and that this can be further teased into a very powerful transform, which we call now, for the last 300 years, we call it calculus. Now, the ability to give a shape scientifically to calculus, by Newton and Leibniz, contemporaneously, at the very same time, because they both shared a historical context that allowed them to emerge a scientific shape of calculus to this. The Chinese developed calculus about 900 years ago in Taoist monasteries and they used it as a meditation technique, an advanced Zen discipline for the acrobatics and the proportions and ratioings of an infinite and empty consciousness in all of its play, but they did not have an historical dynamic within which to develop the mathematics, to develop the science. The noting of this was done by Joseph Needham in Science and Civilisation in China, which is now about 20 volumes, Cambridge University Press, which has been being published for almost more than half a century. What is important is that without historical dynamic, science does not emerge and because it does not emerge, a real analytic does not occur. A real analytic is based upon the kaleidoscopic consciousness, which history certainly is, of exploring possibilities and therefore one of the interesting qualities that one can talk about of historical consciousness, is that it is experiment. And is directly related to the visionary, differential consciousness of theory, theoria. Theory, in its process field and experiment in its flow, kaleidoscopic differentiality, together allow for a co-ordination which is not based upon alignment, but which is expressed in an harmonic and the harmonic is between the person as an art form and the cosmos as a scientific form. So that person and cosmos relate not by alignment, not by geometry, not even in a clever trigonometric integral, but they relate in an harmonic capable of both an analytic, an analysis and an appreciation, an aesthetic. So that when you have a really conscious, visionary field, with an historical, kaleidoscopic, conscious, multiplicity of flows, now the arts and sciences belong together in a university. And the world's first university was developed by Pythagoras, 2500 years ago. And to get there, Pythagoras was an extraordinarily different kind of a character. His name, 'Pythagoras,' comes from 'Python,' the 'Pythian,' because he was born at the oracle of the Pythian Apollo, at Delphi. His mother was Samos, one of the Ionian Greek islands off what is now the coast of Turkey, but his father, Mnesarchus, was from Phoenicia and was the inheritor of a very powerful shipping tradition. His family owned shipping and the shipping was able to carry them from the coast of what is today Lebanon, from Tyre and from the city just north of it, Sidon and carry shipping all the way across the Mediterranean. So Mnesarchus was constantly like a Phoenician, proto-Greek, shipping magnate and one of the reasons why Pythagoras felt so comfortable later in life, after 50 years of study, he went back to Samos and nobody there could get him. So he took himself to southern Italy, to Cortona, which was very near the Gulf of Tarentum, where his father and his own family had had shipping contacts for centuries. And there he developed the seed Pythagorean communities, which for the first time in history featured equally men and women. So that ever after you can tell when there's a Pythagorean spiritual community, because there are men and women together. There are no Buddhist monasteries, there are no Christian monasteries that have them together. There are no Taoist monasteries that have them together, there are certainly no Jewish secret places that have them together, there are no Islamic places. There are Pythagorean places and their inheritance were men and women together, as an interpenetrative gender community, explore the cycle of nature and the ecology of consciousness together. But it engenders enemies and most of the Pythagorean communities in southern Italy were destroyed. They were burnt to the ground and as the people fled the burning buildings, they were killed. So, in order to disperse this treasure, there were many seed Pythagorean communities across the classic world. That there were not many people there, but they were potent. The earliest outside of the southern Italian, original Pythagorean communities, the earliest was in Egypt, before Alexandria was built. When its site, its partial site, was occupied by the Egyptian village of Rakotis, about 25 miles, 30 miles to the west, right at the border of classical, what is today Libya, which is farther over, but then it was the beginning of the Libyan deserts and the extent of the natural lake Mareotis reached all the way in parallel with the Mediterranean coast and right at the end of it there was a ridge and on this ridge, about two miles further, was the traditional line where one left the Egyptian Delta authority reach and the beginnings of the Cyrenaica reach from further Libya. And it's exactly at that spot that the Ancient Egyptian site of Taposiris was located. And Taposiris was the emergence of the resurrected Osiris. Resurrected not by himself, but resurrected because Isis put him back together and the phrase is, poignantly, 'Re-membered.' His members, that were divided into 14 different...they cut him up, she searched out all the missing members and re-membered him back into life. That is a very powerful thing because Taposiris then is related to the spot at which Osiris achieved the ability first to do this and that ability was at Abydos, on the Nile River, many hundreds of miles down the place. And the original temple there is called the Osirian. Now, in our time, 100 years ago, the Osirian was not excavated yet and the American in charge of doing a lot of this work, Flinders Petrie and his wife, chose a very interesting young British woman, named Margaret Murray, to help participate and oversee the excavations of the Osirian, which had been so powerful in Ancient Egypt many times, that when really powerful new dynasties were made and you had literate pharaohs, like Seti I, who built an enormous temple as like a pronaos to the Osirian in front of it. And his great successor in that Dynasty was Rameses II, who was the greatest builder in Egyptian history. He built everywhere, all the time, for nearly three quarters of a century. And the Osirian was particularly a place where the two genders reached a special kind of a complementarity, because the site of Abydos is that the fertile Nile, where it floods, reaches just to an edge and right at that edge, the real desert begins. But the desert is not the high, vast Saharan, Libyan waste, but because there is a very peculiar mountain ridge that comes in two great abutments...one of them is like bold head abutment and is male. The other has a different kind of a tapering and is female and these two arcing mountains embrace the site of Abydos so that it is protected from the high desert, except for one little dip, one little wedge, one little gap, in that powerful mountain ridge and it is through that gap that the spirit of anyone resurrected with the Osirian religion is free to go, not into the desert, but into the vast, unpopulated wildness of the wilderness of God. There to achieve the ability then to purify themselves and raise themselves back up to the stars. So that the ancient Osirian religion was not just a religion, but it was a technology of rebirth, but the rebirth depended on re-membering. And if you were not re-membered by your Isis, by your life force carrier, you will not be resurrected. So Taposiris is where this happened. It was on that spot that the Pythagorean community of the Therapeutae was founded. It was on that spot that centuries and centuries later, that Jesus became the head of the community and taught there for 30 years and one of his deepest companions was Mary Magdalene. This is a powerful quality and one that can only be understood if you begin to get the historical consciousness of the periodicities of the large, not the mental, structured order, but the harmonic sets of resonance, sets of sets. And when you work with set theory and you approach then the harmonic analysis and the aesthetic appreciation at the same time, you begin to have, not only ears to hear and eyes to see, but you begin to have a consciousness that is conscious and being conscious of consciousness is kaleidoscopic. And one of the qualities that comes out of this is that when two consciousnesses harmonically ratio together, it is a permanent actuality in the natural, integral world. The planets around a star will always collect on the gravitational ratios, they must be there. And when the qualities of the ratios, first understood in this star system just a couple of hundred years ago, is that the sequencing of the ratios will have a mathematical treatment that always brings them back to unity, back to ones. And when William Herschel and his sister Caroline first put that together, they understood that the orbits of the planets located such that there must be a planet here. And Herschel and his sister Caroline, looked, built large enough telescopes in their backyard, till finally it was exactly where the Pythagoreans would say it was, that was the planet Uranus. And Uranus was the first planet outside of the classical, forever, seven planets. Five planets, the sun and the moon. Here was an eighth planet and that if there is an eighth planet where it should be, the harmonic sequence shows there should be another planet and it was in 1846, just a generation or so later, that Neptune was found, exactly where it should be, exactly. We live in a time where in the last decade we have understood that there are as many small planets like Pluto, beyond Neptune, that they would easily make several thousand times the mass of the earth. That there should be at least 40 or 50 larger than Pluto sized worlds and maybe 100,000 moon sized worlds like the moons around Saturn or Uranus and that this Kuiper belt extends out, resonantly, an extraordinary distance. And that beyond them must be a spherical halo called the Oort cloud, for Jan Oort, who was a famous Netherlands astronomer and that the full extent of our star system, from Oort cloud shell, to Oort cloud shell, in a direct line, is about one light year. So oddly enough, our new civilisation, our true home world is about the diameter of what light would move in an earth year. It's called just desserts, it's called paradox beyond belief, it's called science, it's called the beauty of the art of the spiritual persons locating themselves where they really are and they are in a life scale that is backyard one light year and from there the interstellar adventures are a matter of going out your front door and taking a walk around the block for a little bit, around the neighbourhood and finally out into a wider world. Within 50 light years of our star system are several tens of thousands of star systems and beyond them, trillions. Our past civilisations were not even ready for the sandbox and for human beings to fight over shovelfuls of sand, when there are beaches without end, is a stupidity that must end now. It is not to be continued. And any species promoting that in this star system better sign up to take the course.
One of the qualities that we have seen is that in that resonance, in that periodicity, in that analytic, if one moves by a 500 year Cycle of the Phoenix, testified by Tacitus, the most sober of Roman historians, testified by Pliny in his ten volume Natural History, the greatest scientist of that age, testified by a great Roman historian, Dio Cassius. All of them report accurately of the Cycle of the Phoenix. And the last Cycle of the Phoenix was established 36 AD. That was the year Jesus was crucified and resurrected. And right away the resonance hit the historical, conscious continuum and dynamic and within six months of that Tiberius Caesar was dead and Caligula, who came in, was so unstable, so unprepared for the energy dynamic wavelets, that he lasted about four years, not quite four years, three years and some months, before he was just murdered by his own people. They brought in what they thought was a buffoon, Claudius, that he wouldn't do too much and he could also be led around by the skirts surrounding him. And so they thought they would ply Claudius and when he finally passed from the scene, they allowed a usurping, distant Caesar relative, Nero, to come into play. And finally he was completely unacceptable; he had the bad taste to bring Rome down so he could rebuild it himself. So they got rid of him. And in that year, of 68 AD, four different emperors tried to sit in the hot seat, but the wavelets of the Cycle of the Phoenix, once they start occurring, have a stronger dynamic than empires. Each one of them failed miserably, within months, till it was decided, 'We need a whole different dynasty.' And so the Flavian Dynasty came in with Vespasian, who felt that he could handle that energy because he had had a very peculiar career. He had been appointed as soon as Claudius was made Emperor, in 41, 42 AD. Claudius wanted to establish that he was able to extend the Roman Empire and so he went to Britain, he went to the south of Britain, where it would be easy to have military victories and Vespasian was his General in the south of England and it was in the district between the Isle of Wight and Stonehenge. And right at the edge of that is where the original Glastonbury community, that was a replica of the Therapeutae community, established by the four sisters of Jesus and their husbands, established by Lazarus and his sister Martha, established by the partner of one of the husbands of one of Jesus' sisters, his name was Joseph of Arimathea and his business partner in the shipping routes that they took over from the Phoenicians, was named Nicodemus, he and his wife. So that you had six men and six women, who founded a Pythagorean, early...it wasn't even called Christians yet, was simply called 'The Way.' It was called the Way because the Way was the ancient way to talk about the Way. And because it was enormously expanded, it very quickly became 'The Great Way.' And when it expanded, it expanded as a harmonic and it went equally as far east as it did west, to the west of England and the east went all the way to the east coast of India. And there in the east coast of India, around Madras, one finds a complement to the Glastonbury Tor, which is the Hill of Saint Thomas. And from the Hill of Saint Thomas was the beginning of the teachings that led to the establishment of the Great Way in India, called the Mah?y?na, in Sanskrit. And so the Mah?y?na is a Hellenistic-Jewish Christianity in India and transforms the Buddha into a buddhisatra. From someone who is extinguished and vanished there where you are, into being resonantly cosmic. Now, all of this is historical, kaleidoscopic consciousness that has never been told. Not just not told properly, but never told. Because it was not tellable any time until now, because what is delivered in a cosmic harmonic is that it plays itself out in a special pacing which is historical and establishes itself in its cycles, not just in its 500 year Phoenix Cycles, but in its double Phoenix Cycles of a millennium, of its double millennium in an aeon and then in its multiples of aeonic that don't go into doubles, but go now into cubes. So that you have a possibility of understanding and locating whatever has occurred and whoever has occurred, in such a way that one can understand the oikoumene. The single familyness of life in the star system. Not just that all mankind is a family, but all life in this star system is a family. We can be adopted by and adopt animals, trees and plants and minerals and metals, so that someone is not just wearing a silver bracelet made by Zuni friends, but that the symbol on it is a cloud and then the cloud has a further expansion, so that it's a thunder head, a big cloud, a double cloud and then the bracelet itself is another cloud, so it's a triple cloud, which is my Indian name. And when Triple Cloud presents in this way, you're being shown something that is a frame of reference, a square of attention, that opens out into freedom, without end. That was the phrase used then and now, 'Worlds without end.' More next week.