Presentation 3

We come to the third presentation in the Shared Presence Harmonic, a series of 13 presentations. And I've been working with the 13 part presentation since 1965. The Classic Upanishads are presented as the 13 Classic Upanishads by the great Robert Hume of the Union Theological Seminary in New York City in 1921. There is such a thing as a set. This third presentation brings in a new insight to the basic form of the base of what we're looking at in the first two presentations. In the very first presentation, I gave us a tripod. I gave us three figures who were contemporaries, who founded the classic way in which civilizations jumped a whole order above what they had been at that time for about 25,000 years. 2500 years. Excuse me. So that if we look back to 3000 BC, in that 5000 year period where civilizations have become the strongest expression of human life on this planet, about midway is what the great philosopher and philosopher of history Karl Jaspers, called the Axial Period. It is the period where the consummate genius of all of the great civilizations on the planet, all at the same time, came through a watershed, came through a threshold of genius. The three that I initially singled out for us were Lao Tzu in China, the Buddha in India, and Pythagoras in the Mediterranean. Pythagoras uniting not only Greece and Egypt, but also because of his family background as Phoenicians, and also because he spent 11 years in Persia, so that he unites the ancient fertile civilization, the Fertile Crescent, stretching from the Persian Gulf all the way to the Mediterranean Sea, and extends the original limits of that fertile crescent founded by Sargon of Akkad about 2350 2300 BC. Extends it all the way to the Greek Aegean and all the way, in fact to southern Italy. Those three are a good initial tripod. Today we're going to bring in a fourth figure who, while not a contemporaneous person with those three, had a great revival. And the classic presentation of that fourth person who is Zarathustra comes into play exactly at the same time as the other three through the revival of Cyrus the Great, who founded the Achaemenid dynasty and who reinstated the classic Persian, the classic Iranian take on civilization, replacing the Babylonian, the Assyrian, the Neo-Babylonian replacing the Iraqi area of the two rivers with the plateaux and mountains of southern Iran. And the great city that was built at the time was Persepolis. Zarathustra is the most underestimated of all great world figures at the current time, and one of the great books that came out a couple of years ago by the great Norman Cohen, published by Yale, and its title is cosmos, chaos, and the World to Come. Why they missing piece of Zoroastrian wisdom gives a false picture to the developments of world religion. Gives a fractured misunderstanding to the developments of Islam. The developments of Christianity. The developments of Judaism, the developments in fact of the far Asian religions China and Central Asia, and reaching all the way to Japan and down to Indonesia. I made a ten year study of Zarathushtra from 1984, and by 1994 produced a translation of the Gothis of Zarathustra with my wonderful long time Iranian friend Homa Ghahremani, and I translated in a very special way the Ancient Goths The Songs of Zarathustra, which were not written in Farsi. They were not written in Persian. They were written in an ancient language called Avesta, and one of the original great Avestic grammars by AV. Williams, Jackson, Abraham, Valentine, Williams, Jackson and the Avesta is in comparison with Sanskrit because ancient Avesta is cognate with ancient Sanskrit. They are Indo-European languages. They are not Arabic languages like Farsi or Persian, and they have a special cognate structure. Uh. The most recent great grammar is published by E.J. Brill in 1988. A Grammar of Gatha Avestan Robert S.P. Beekes. Avestan as a poetic language goes back to the very roots of the wisdom language written in the world, And this is from my introduction. And, uh, permit me just to read a couple of lines here. Zarathustra is sometimes dated to 600 BC by the Western tradition, which is when they. Beginnings the very early beginnings of the revival that led Cyrus the Great by 539 to establish the Achaemenid dynasty. Iranian tradition dates him to 1776 BC. A significant difference in levels of civilization. We have come to the conclusion from language and referent matrix sense, that Zarathustra belongs to the period around 2300 BC, the time of Sargon of Akkad, so that Zarathustra is a contemporary of Nagarjuna, who writes the great cycle of Inanna myths, who writes the 42 temple hymns uniting all of the land of the two rivers, all of Sumer and Akkad, into a single jewel of 42 facets, cut with a high rising poetic language to make a single jewel that could then be shared throughout a wide swath of the world, from the Aegean to of the Indus River in India. One aspect to this is that the word Gatha in Avesta translates in the early Sanskrit to a guitar, and later on it becomes guitar. Like Bhagavad Gita. It means a poetic form. And this is a few lines on Gothus. The gothus we have translated are only those classically identified as Zarathustra's own voice, because they were added to when Cyrus the Great and his magnificent son Darius and grandson, uh, Xerxes. These were kings indeed. They made sure that their contribution to the revival was a true renaissance, and so they added their own, uh, developments to it. And so they Zarathustra literature becomes expanded at that time. And for the next, um, almost 800, 900 years, you find expansions. But the original Zarathustra authors, uh, are uh in the translation that I have done here. And just to skip over and begin with Yasna each, uh series, each, uh, Yasna has a number of verses called hots. A hot is usually three lines in double parts, which pair the phrasing into a mode of formally balanced poetic prayer, so that you have a poetic architecture that has a racial thing. Proportionate ability. The beginning of it is to use three lines balanced by three lines, so that the middle of the hot will give you a a pause in the sense that one now takes those three and raises them to three more related, in the sense that one now has taken a new breath. And now what you are saying fortifies the. The best English word is the oomph of the hearing of it. One now hears in ancient poetics, later on in the Greek and in the Hebrew, when Hebrew and Greek first, uh, uh came into their being about 1000 BC. You found in both the use of pairs of lines where the second line fortifies what the first line is by giving a stronger variant of it, for instance, and then having pairs of pairs of lines which give you four lines, which becomes the classic poetic quatrain. All through history and one finds quatrains of Omar Khayyam, one finds quatrains of metaphysical poets in England in the 17th century. We have quatrains. Yet today the whole basis is that there is a poetic architecture, and that one must not only be able to hear, one must be able to hear in the correct tone. And so it is incumbent on someone who writes a spiritual language to make sure that the voice is toned by a spiritual presence. And this series is called Shared Presence, so that the tuning to the tone is a key to the spiritual shared presence. If the speaker is in tune with the hearer, toned to a deep presence. Then one with ears to hear will hear exactly through that tone, and their presence will be shared, and a radiance will come out of this. Each yajna has a number of verses called hearts. A heart usually has three lines and double parts, which pair the phrasing into a mode of formally balanced poetic prayer. We have translated 238 hot's. If a word count taken, some 55,055 5560 words appear in our text of the Goths, um. 5560 characters And the Goths of Zarathustra in the Tao Te Ching. 5500 Chinese characters. There is a deep connection between ancient Iran, not situated in the current Iran, but north of it in Central Asia, that earlier Avestan language civilization had the development for the first time in world history of the Taming of the horse, and because they had the vast stretches of Central Asia to deal with, they also were the first to develop chariots. They were the first to develop wagons to cart materials. The first to be able to take large numbers of beasts of burden that were also then tamed later on. Camels. Uh, the mule. Not donkeys, but the wiry, black haired ancient mule, which was the original symbol for Jews because the Jewish caravan routes used the black haired donkey to go into this great fertile crescent from the Indus to the Aegean. And one of the reasons that Jesus at the end rode into Jerusalem on an ass was to reassert that this is the fulfillment and the culmination of all of the caravans that have ever been held. This arrives here, new at a new kind of oasis, an oasis of ultimate challenge, of death and of ultimate response, of resurrection. Here is the way in which the original beginning of the original Gatha Yasna 28, in my translation from the Avestan. It begins with a tuning of the voice to get the tone, and the tuning of the voice always began with r, so that even in Sanskrit. Later on, when one had oome to tune the voice om. Um, its pronunciation and slow tone is um, begins with a, goes to u, ends with M and an exclamation mark to show that it ends with a rising. And in Sanskrit, the word for rising is uh ud uh and uh gatha is gatha in Sanskrit. So um is the udgitha. It's the way that you tune your hearing so that if you have ears to hear. Now here is something to hear. One speaks. And the classic use of this spiritually is Jesus teaching. If you have ears to hear, we together will share the radiance and the radiance in Zarathustra is Mazda. Mazda. Mazda is a feminine like radiance. One of the great ancient lines of love poetry, said she lay upon her couch like living lightning. Here's how Zarathustra began his goth is. 4000 years ago. Are to the high, I pray with hands held up to spirit. Mazda first and pure Asha. In all deeds are good Herald mind. This pleases creation's soul. Asha is truth personified. She is the feminine spirit of exactness and formal rectitude, similar to Athena. A feminine complement to Vohuman, which is good mind. Uh. Herod. Kay. Herod. Herod is a power of manifesting similar to Tae in the Taoist Chinese sense, where unity or oneness, the strict wholeness upon which all else is based, are to the high. I pray with hands held up to spirit. Mazda first and pure Asha in all deeds. Our good Herod mind. This pleases creation's soul. I to you, Mazda Ahura encompassing with vohuman to me be granted paired living existence and also mind in blessing from Asha, where dedicated meaning leads to light. Vohuman has good mind is the person of the arriving presence the intelligence that is not only alert, but is creatively able to participate in a transforming way. The masculine complement to Asha. The third hot of the 28th Yasna. I to you in Asha. Breathing hymns in Vohuman as circles to Mazda and to Ahura. Through my shastra Boundlessly ever resonant in Armaiti. To my joy my calling comes Kshatra is the person's spirit who carries the oneness wave of Herod. The power of realizing unity, a complement to Armaiti. Armaiti is love personified as a feminine spirit, similar to Sophia in Greek or Kwan Yin in the Chinese tradition. She gifts us with grace of heart, which is the essence of the Holy. She goes with Cassandra as a pair. She fulfills the masculine Cassandra so that you have something interesting that is developing. You have pairs that are developing. You have masculine feminine pairs that are developing. But out of the four pairs. The highest pair actually bring the three levels of the other pairs to a culmination, so that the eight is actually three pairs making six, and the fourth pair makes not just an eight, but makes something which then cups all of the rest of it into a larger, radiant unity. Not a unity of one, but a unity of infinity. Instead of having a logical symmetry, it has a radial symmetry, and it has the image of a spiral. When it's put into a delivery, it has the image of a star. When it's put into a moment of eureka, of understanding, of intuitive insight. So the star and the spiral are qualities of a radial symmetry, where the balance is a quality of the symmetry of an integral. The star and the spiral are symbols of a differential conscious ecology. The balance, the judgment of evenness, the equanimity and equipoise are symbols of an integral. Ahura is a quality that goes with the radiance of Mazda, and Ahura is the incredible infinite expansiveness of a field of infinite differential consciousness. Here, in the fourth hot of the 28th Yasna, Zarathushtra writes my deep, self exalted abode, the good Equanimous mind with Asha in deeds of knowing. Mazda Ahura until will and strength encompass I educate by striving for Asha. By approaching Athena. By approaching Asia, one has the ability to bring equanimity to a threshold where it can flash into a radial symmetry. In Homer, Athena is presented in his beautiful hexameter lines. When he is. When Odysseus finally makes it back to back to Ithaca and is a put onto the beach with his treasures by the Phaeacians, who then row away, and Odysseus must face the 105 suitors that are jamming his palace and trying to, uh, take his wife Penelope, away and, uh, uh, ruin the young manhood of his son Telemachus. And he is used to dissembling. He's used to telling, uh, little stories so that nobody really knows that he's the king returning. And when he first wakes up from his exhaustion, sleep on the beach, uh, near a cave at the north end of Ithaca, he sees a woman standing, and he right away says, well, I'm a I'm a traveling seaman with wares from Crete. And she says, do not lie to me, Odysseus. And Odysseus finally looks up, and when he looks up, he sees the gray eyes of Athena as the perfectly balanced pair looking through him so that he gets the sense, as Homer says, that he's looking at the farthest horizon of a gray sea under a gray sky, and that he realizes, he says, forgive me, goddess. I did not look before I spoke. I will not lie to you. And here is Ahura Mazda having that equanimous effect. And Zarathustra is saying, and now having the page in its horizon, we will make a language that leaps off the page into the spherical spirit. Here is the way the fifth hot of the 28th Yazdi reads in translation my translation Asia. When I see you in mind and good wisdom, guided by Ahuras Almighty Sraosha brilliance realized with this mantra the brightest convert ignorance with language. Um. Sraosha is the proper name of the divine Spirit, delivered from the real verb meaning to hear. If you have ears to hear, and you hear someone speaking in such a way that you share the presence with them, the infinite radiance in a spiral and star like openness. Gift us with truth. With accuracy. Not an opinion, not even a complex opinion. But the Greek word is aletheia. It means there are no more pros and cons possible, because this presents itself as a most rare occurrence and the symbolic expression of it that I have come to and am going to put on the cover of my Hermetica book, which I'm making copies of now for people is a zero with a tilde over it, and the mathematical symbol for a function, and then an infinity sign. And the way to read it is that an inflected zero functions in an 11 dimensional infinity creatively. So Sraosha is the proper name of the divine Spirit, derived from the real verb meaning to hear. Sraosha is masculine and is associated with the verb to be obedient. That is to say, to respond to the truth. Be doers of the word. This connotates dedication, the one who hearkens to God's purpose. He hearkens also to man's prayers in manthra form. Manthra is the Avesta, which in Sanskrit becomes mantra One chants a mantra. But it isn't that like the colloquial popular New Age isms, that some guru gives you a mantra. A mantra is your spirit, having heard sings its own original mantra. When you are spontaneously able to not only sing a mantra, but to sing many mantras and to lift classic mantras off the page by your reciting or by your hearing it when it is recited spiritually. This is the way that one senses truth with being. Um sraosha harkens also to man's prayers in mantra form, so that mantra and divinity are a pair to sraosha, and the inner, uh, would be a good translation whose alert attention joins God and man in a continuity of shared purpose. The shared purpose, when it has a continuity, becomes the kaleidoscopic consciousness of history. History is not a record of dead things. History is the kaleidoscopic, complex continuity of raising myth out of the discourse language through the transparent symbols of the written language into the poetry of the artistic language that can be written and read from the writing, so that it occurs now historically kaleidoscopically real in the sense that now what is going to come out of this is something which is spectacular. In Judaism, the ancient symbol was the menorah, seven candles, not the nine that you usually see. That's a 17th century revision. The central candle in the classical menorah is used to light the other six. The other six are like the six of the three pairs of the Holy spirits, the, um Misha, uh, Spenta of Zarathustra. And the central one is Ahura Mazda. Together so tuned that they form a higher unity, as it were, not a unity of one, but a unity of infinity, which is a paradox. Here is the sixth heart of the 28th Yasna. Good arriving mind. Bestow Asha's gifts lasting righteous in your words Mazda zarathushtra's vibrant joy together and as Ahura sophos hatred is radicalized. Bestow Asha her gifts of good blessed mind. Bestow your armaiti vishtaspa's wish mine also giving your strength of Mazda through Manthra attentive listening. Vishtaspa was the legendary example of a king of Central Asia, what the Greeks called Bactria later on from Alexander the Great's day, whose wish became realized when converted by Zarathustra from the state of ignorance and deception to spirit presenting truth and the last one before we take a break. The eighth hot of the 28th Yasna in my translation. The best in one's goodness in OSHA's fineness, in sync with Ahura when seeking sincerity, the valiant far astray for me and all of us indeed displays good eternal mind. Uh. Fausta was Zarathushtra's father in law, the father of his wife, whose name was ho ho v h v o VI ho v. Let's take a break. Let's come back. We're looking at the way in which there is a pivot, an axis, an axial age which generates the torque that has powered civilization. The earliest great civilizations were 3000 BC, the beginnings of dynastic Egypt, the early kings of China. Fu XI, the maker of the Bagua. The trigrams that became the I Ching. The development of cities in Mesopotamia. The land between the two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, that came to be a league of Sumerian cities 3000 BC 5000 years ago. We live at the thrust of a watershed in our time now, which is a another jump of civilization, a third level of civilization on this planet. The beginnings of civilization in a powerful way. 5000 years ago from us had a pivot 2500 years ago, and we established in the first two presentations a triad, a tripod of. Classic founders of sage wisdom. Lao Tzu in China. The Buddha in India, Pythagoras and the Mediterranean. And we're bringing in a fourth figure today in the third presentation of Zarathustra, who had a renaissance exactly at that time, at the time of the founding of the Achaemenid dynasty by Cyrus the Great, who is also the figure who ended the exile of the Jews and let them go back home, let them go back to Jerusalem. Let them come out of exile. And there is a great confluence. We talked about the great book of Norman Cohen on cosmos, chaos and the World to come, of how missing out on Zoroastrianism is a flaw in the understanding of what this planet has developed as the highest expression of human life on this planet. Great civilizations. And so we're bringing Zarathustra back in. And in particular, we're using my translation made in 19, finished in 1994 after ten years of working on it from 1984. Of The Goths of Zarathustra from the Avestan. Here is. A little something that I think will be interesting. We talked about the menorah having seven candles, three on each side. We talked about the seventh being the center one, and the center candle is used to light the other six. So that they original poetic form of the Goths in each hut. The first Yasna that Zarathustra wrote had 11 um hots. Each hot has a pair of three lines that come together, making a six lines. It is the igniting of those six line forms into a moment of insight that brings the Ahura into play, such that the radiance of Mazda is realized. Here the six are the holy spirits, the Amesha Spentas, who are in male female pairs, and Ahura Mazda is a male female pair that goes beyond perennis. And to understand this beyond Paradise, we have to come to the idea of para sexuality. A para sexuality is not a parentage, but a para sexuality is a species origination. The correct term for this, developed in the late 20th century early 21st century, is symbiotic. A birth by symbiosis goes back to the original figure that brings that species first into play. This is an act of creation of pure sexuality beyond sexuality. A parentage is always to make a fertility between the pair, but the pair in a para sexuality do not merge so much as that they tune to perfection so that there is no longer the need for a symmetry of equanimity. It changes. It transforms into a symmetry of a rotational radial of openness. Its shape is infinity, whereas a parental sexuality shape is the physical figure. The physical capacities. The mental capacities. The integral cycle of culmination in a new someone. Ahura. This is from my introduction. Ahura coordinates with us six spirits. They are personified and collectively known as the Amesha Spentas. They're coordinated by Ahura as a guardian spirit of intelligence, who in teaching brings into play the vitality of six fellow spirits. These six operate in three pairs. Now, it's important to understand that if you go into 21st century. Um, physics, there not only are electrons and the parachute, the positron, the positive of the negative charged electron, there's a pair of electrons and positrons. There's a higher energy pair, the muon and the anti muon. And on level of cosmic gamma rays there is a higher particle, the Tao particle and the anti Tao particle not able to even be discovered or found until 1983 at the Fermi National Lab outside of Chicago. So that the very nature of electromagnetic energy has also three pairs of levels. So we're looking at something here that is not mythological. We're looking at the precision of the spirit person to accurately discern truth in its resonant tuned radiance and express it for that age. And whenever a new time form comes around, it must be re-expressed as it is now in our time form. Civilization is now no longer limited to this planet. The smallest level of our civilization now is our star system. So the correct way to talk about the civilization emerging is that it is a stellar civilization. It is not only based upon the star, but based upon the entire spiral circling of all the bodies in the star system together as a new, higher whole. And if one uses later 21st century discoveries that radius, that diameter of the new civilization will be about one light year, which means capacities from us raised more than a thousand times beyond what they are in 2009 within the next generation or two. So we are teaching in the classic way, but in the new poetic that is required. It always starts small. If it were recognized, it would be star system wide, which it will. The first pair and these. This is the third pair that comes. We've talked about Asha, the feminine spirit of order and Vohuman the masculine good mind. We've talked about kshatra and Armaiti love and the development of powerful capacities for coming together. The third pair. And it's the first pair in my introduction. The first pair we can mention are Ameretat and Haurvatat. In fact, they are always referred to as the twins. They are the twins because they only occur together. They are twins, like quarks almost always appear as pairs. In fact. However, as our health on earth. While Ameretat is our eternal health. As soon as one has a health on earth, you also have an eternal health. A meritorious immortality and Harvey is our full, healthy life. They are interrelated in such a way that they always occur together. So it's like a resonance that is soon as the good health on this earth hums, the hum carries into immortality. A second pair is Asha, Truth or Order, and her paired complement Vohuman good mind. They are usually mentioned in distinct and separated designation, yet they form a pair to close attention based on Zarathushtra's words. If the good mind hears in the good order the mind of the good order close to the presence, not a present moment. The present as a moment is a fictitious projection of a mental idea of a moment. When last week we talked about the relationship of the historical Buddha. Of being the greatest yogic meditator on the planet to that point. He was so incredibly precise that he could take a moment of thought. It's called a in Sanskrit, a chitta. And he cut the moment of thought the cheetah with a presence of enlightenment called a cheetah. And he cut the moment of thought into 16. He split the moment of thought into 16. And what came out was his expression that only eight of the 16 are able to be discursively talked about. The other eight always occur together. The musical term is in a trill. So when you hear the eight notes of an octave, do re me fa so la TI do. The first doe and the second doe. The second doe is a hum echo of the first doe. And it makes the octave which already has begun the next eight. Which means that the eighth reveals itself as the seed of as the ninth, so that octaves like a chain link together and one can have a sequence of octaves like a piano, which will have 11 octaves in its keyboard. From which one then can make incredible music. The development of the piano coincided with the emergence of a young boy named Mozart, and an older musician named Papa Haydn. And while Haydn is fantastic, Mozart was incredible. He took the new instrument, not a harpsichord, a piano, and he made the kind of music that one still plays hundreds of years later, with great pleasure at the way in which a great pianist will perform this. Um. Glenn Gould's, uh, classic playing of, uh, piano, uh, Bach or Haydn or Mozart is an exemplar. What we're looking at is the present moment is a fictitious unity. What is real is the continuity. Because in between the eight distinct parts of a moment of thought, the other eight are not just a trill, but they are the silence in between the parts that allows for the convergence of the eight parts as a note, but that that note is not a note. It is the linking of a whole harmonic set of resonances, so that the truth of it is that there is not a moment of the present. There is a continuity of presence. If you cannot hear the silence along with the language, you would not be able to hear the words distinct. You would hear them as gobbledygook. Blur. Gibberish. And if you look at early second century wisdom texts, they will have long strings of are you or. But to hear words, you have to hear the silence between the vowels, between the consonants, between the syllables, between the words, so that you carry your zeros with you while you make the pattern of the unities. Which is why, as we said early this morning, the way the Goths of Zarathustra began is with ah! The ohm in Sanskrit is the, as we said was the Udgitha. It's the uprising gatha and it's the word not just om. But if you slow it down, it's ohm. Uh, ohm. And the exclamation mark is the raising of it. So that that end of it is a silence which exclaims, its exclamatory! It's the silence that's exclamatory. And if you look at the classic Upanishads, you will see that they end with three ohms ohm, ohm ohm, followed by three Shanti, shanti shanti. Peace, peace, peace. So a second pair is Asha. Truth or order and her paired complement Vohuman good mind. They are usually mentioned in distinct and separated designation, yet they form a pair to close attention based on Zarathushtra's words. A third strength of being. Uh, we sometimes would say fortitude, except that in our Renaissance iconography. Fortitude is feminine in the tarot deck. She holds the jaws of the lion open. But in 4000 years ago. The origins of the Magi civilization of Zarathustra are a strength of being, and his paired complement Armaiti who is love, strength of being and love pair they tune. Love fortifies not the individual, but fortifies the tunability of two or more gathered together as a higher unity. It isn't that you put two ones together, but you put a one and a zero together to make a mystery. That mystery, then, is a two. Only when they are tuned and paired are they two. But in order to do that, each needs to be a one and a zero together so that you get the one and one of the numerators, but you get the zeros of the denominators also coming together. And when you get A00, your license to be infinite. Sorry for the play on words. Let's come to my translation. We gave the first six hots of the 28th, the first Yasna. Here's how Zarathushtra wrote 4000 years ago in my translation of about 15 years ago. Bestow Asha her gifts of good, blessed mind. Bestow your armaiti vishtaspa's wish mine also giving your strength of Mazda through manthra attentive listening, and we talked about how Vishtaspa was a legendary example of a king of Central Asia. Alexander the Great called it in his time Bactria. Whose wish became realized when converted by Zarathushtra from the state of ignorance and deception to spirit presenting truth. It was as it always is. It is what the famous phrase that was used in the 1920s was the shock of recognition. The great literary critic Edmund Wilson has a collection of essays and reviews called The Shock of Recognition. Not only is it true, it never was not true. And by this, human beings and all sentient beings become holy because they learn that they have learned. Eternity is not a fiction. God is exemplarily real. Here's the 29th Yasna for us. You never. Ahura Mazda in Asha reward, harm. And the mind that is best you recognize as offering praise to you. Worthy praise is powerful. Spirit chants, mantras, mantras. Therefore, to those in Asha, in knowing the good seeing mind upright Mazda Ahuras grant them to reach the goal desired. Therefore you beyond fault. I realize sublime in loving words. So with all of us. Asha, guardian of good eternity. Mind you, Mazda Ahura, teach me your own self words. The spirit through your voice, the thus ness of first existence. So this is my poetic presenting of the Gothis of Zarathustra, and it's quite a large book. Um, it's about 300 some pages with a long introduction. And just to give you a little bit more, here's a section of my introduction. The lead is radiance. Anciently in Iran, the image of Mithra is the soul of the sun, and not just the sun reductively itself. And there is a power that makes the son move. A dynamic movement itself which is resonantly generated space. Shining is such a movement. Shining in this understanding is not a static attribute. God's radiance. His glory is creation virtually happening? The Akkadian word for that sun's face was Shamash. Even later in the Jewish tradition, it was remembered well. Thus this ancient lesson of propriety for the seventh candle of the menorah is called Shamash, and is used to light the other six candles. This is the illumined ordering of perfection. So originally in the Goths does Ahura bring the other six amesha spentas into perfected light, and the true glory of Mazda is seen. Now it's evident. That there is a ancient, crucial resonance between Zarathustra, Judaism and Christianity and Islam, and one of the most powerful books written about this. It was written by an Oxford professor of great renown, but it was published in Chicago in 1906. Zarathushtra, Philo. The Achaemenids and Israel. Philo of Alexandria. Lawrence H. Mills, Professor of Zen Philology in the University of Oxford. And we'll talk about this a little later. A treatise upon the Antiquity and Influence of the Avesta. And another book published in Chicago by him. Why? Chicago? Because at the turn of the 1890s, Chicago was the most powerful upcoming city on the planet. And in order to commemorate that condition, the very first time. In 1893, in Chicago was held the World Parliament of Religions. Delegates of every religion on the planet met together in Chicago. They met in buildings that bordered Grant Park. So the place where the great celebration of Barack Obama of becoming president in Grant Park in Chicago was the place in 1893 where the World Parliament of Religions was held. One of the Hindu delegates to the World Parliament of Religions was the great Vedanta Swami Vivekananda. The person representing Zen from Japan, Zen Buddhism was Soyen Shaku, who was the Zen master of D.T. Suzuki. And my spirit, uh, grandfather Tatanga Mani, walking Buffalo was the American Indian representative to the World Parliament of Religions. He had been abandoned as a baby and was adopted by a Western Canadian rancher named George McLean. And so Tatanga Mani, walking buffalo. Actually last name was McLean. And then his old age he adopted as a spirit daughter a woman named Madame Valda, who was a Russian gypsy princess and a Spanish gypsy princess, but was born in nice because they were very wealthy and lived in a mansion next to Maurice Maeterlinck's mansion. And one time when Valda, who was a great ballerina and movie star before the First World War and during the First World War when she was a girl, was dancing and midnight due on one of the great lawns there. And Maurice Maeterlinck was doing his pipe and brandy contemplation, and saw her dancing in the next morning. When he saw her, he bowed to her. He was one of the great writers of the time of the age, and she adopted me as her spirit son. And when it came time for her to pass on. She was going to pass on to me the headdress of Tatanka mani, which was a buffalo skull that still had the vibrant reddish brown hair and the horns in place. And I said it was a corrupt age, and we should silently and secretly bury this so that it remains holy. Which was done, and about a month later she passed out. If you get interested, there is a film called Saskatchewan Stars Alan Ladd and Tatanka. Mani has a non-speaking role in there. He Is there in the Canadian Rockies, where the Mounties Alan Ladd, as a mountie, are trying to get people through, and there's footage of him on his horse with his buffalo headdress, and you can see the massive he lived to be 97. The massive masculine dignity of spirit person. Simply their mills in writing on Zarathustra and Zoroastrianism published in Chicago. Open court publishing our own religion and ancient Persia being lectures delivered in Oxford, presenting the Zend-avesta as collated with the pre-Christian Exilic Phariseeism, advancing the Persian question to the foremost position in our biblical research, and somebody who did a book on it, Persia and the Bible, Edwin Yamaguchi. A number of years ago. All of this is unrecognized because we live in a ignorant age. In those days, published in 1905, the Journal of the American Oriental Society in New Haven, Connecticut, where Yale is. Abraham Valentine Williams Jackson A.V. Williams Jackson has a little article on the Magi, the Three Magi, the Magi, and Marco Polo, and cities in Persia from which they came to worship the infant Christ. Um. He cites Marco Polo in this great addition of a colonel Gules, and the two volumes are reprinted by Dover Paperbacks, but the commentary notes volume is not there. The addenda and everything. And just for news interest, the greatest pirate fighter of all time was Marco Polo. Because the Indonesian pirates were a perennial wicker labyrinth where the Chinese could not go except out onto the Pacific, they couldn't go through the South China Sea and through the Indonesia into the Indian Ocean. So Marco Polo was delegated by Kublai Khan because he was a very great seaman, and Marco Polo organized a fleet of many, many ships and made a ploy with which to get rid of piracy in Indonesia. And that classic ploy worked. And so China began to build huge fleets, and they would go through Indonesian waters into the Indian Ocean, and not only all the way to India, but all the way to Africa. They would send 100,000 sailors at a time in great flotillas. And one of the things they took from Indonesia to Africa was the musical instrument, the xylophone. There's so much to know. The central city in Persia, where the three kings of the Orient met the three Magi to go to Jerusalem, was Cachun. Cachun is on the edge of a great desert. That great desert some 10,000 years ago was heavily populated, and you have to think to yourself, it was at the same time that the Sahara Desert was heavily populated as well. But the desiccation that happened in the Sahara happened in central Iran, happened in the Gobi in China. And about 10,000 years ago, 12,000 years ago, they became deserts. Uh khashan. Looks somewhat like this with mountains. And the three who brought frankincense, myrrh, and gold. The frankincense and the myrrh are only available in South Arabia. What is today Yemen and Oman. The Yemen was Saba and was always connected across the little Strait of Hormuz with Ethiopia. At that time called Sheba. Yes, the Queen of Sheba was also the Queen of Saba. And she was wealthy because she not only had the incense route, every civilized temple in the world was burning frankincense and using myrrh, and the gold came from a central Africa. So the gold, frankincense and myrrh are a hearkening back to the time of Solomon and the building of the temple. So at the three Magi, bringing gold, frankincense, and myrrh, not only are the building of the new temple, but the bankrolling of the Holy Family so they could flee Herod the Great and spend five years in Egypt, where they were well able to take care of themselves because it doesn't take an awful lot of gold, frankincense, and myrrh to be well off. So the Iranians financed the saving of the Holy Family, and so we had better tread respectfully. More next week.