Presentation 4

They come to the fourth presentation in this set, this resonant set that when we are able to establish the set, like establishing an octave, then we understand a basic unit, which can be interlinked with other basic units and produce a musical instrument like a piano has 11 octaves available to make the kind of music that Mozart first really perfected. We're looking at shared presence, which is a fifth dimension. It is a quintessential it's the fifth essence. The ancient wisdom were there are four essences. Three of them are spatial. One is time. Only the ancient wisdom was that time is the first dimension, and that time is established. And the way that we know this is that is the very first sentence in the very first textbook on geometry, written 300 BC in Alexandria by Euclid. It reads in Greek, not that a line is drawn between two points. That's not the basis of geometry. The Pythagorean basis of geometry is that a locus of no dimension when it moves creates a linearity, and that linearity is time. And that as soon as time in its movement by the first dimension creates a blossoming. Of three other dimensions that are related together as a gestalt known as space. So that a time space is the formation cycle because it has cycles, then because time is not a line, but is a continuous movement of a locus of no dimensions, the first dimension in order for it to remain stable, reiterates itself out of zero all the time, and because it comes out of zero all the time to create time. Time itself is an energy that is iterative beyond count until the 21st century. We now can estimate that the frequency of light of a photon for it to occur, uh, happens so many hundreds of thousands of times per second. So that dimensionality has a peculiar quality and the cycle of nature. It is vibratory. And the way that it maintains its vibration is that the primal quality of stability is that materia in its unification comes out in tuned pairs. So that as we started in presentation one lots of 500 BC in the Tao Te Ching says, the deepest of all is pairing. And while it is primal that the pairing is like a yin yang, the primordial is that it is not yin yang, but the primordial pairing is Tao Te, which is why his book is called the Tao Te Ching, not the Yin Yang Ching. The Yin Yang was a school of thought a couple of hundred years later in Chinese. Yin Yang Chia. The school of Yin Yang and was actually founded by an engineering mathematical genius named Xu Yan. Sujan. Taal Tay is a zero and one primordiality, and the one that comes out is capable of being discerned as a pairing. And so the Tay has a tunable pair, the tau being a zero dimension, does not need tuning. There is nothing to tune or to un tune. And so what is tunable comes out of a field of pure zero. But because it is pure zero, it has an inflection. And that inflected zero allows for an iteration to be stable as long as the pairs are tuned. As long as polarity is tuned so that the insurance of the safety of existence is because there's an equanimity, there's a symmetry, there is a balance that goes back to a primordiality that is truly mysterious, but surfaces in such a way that if we can get the tuning precise and perfect, then we are able to discern the primordiality. Even though it is a mystery and remains mysterious, we participate in understanding. Thus, one can be expressed as one over two plus one over two one half plus one half is one. So that one can write unity in a ratioed way. This makes the mind then able to go an order above existentiality into symbolic understanding that one half plus one half is also one. It's also a unity. One third plus two thirds is that three thirds unity of oneness, so that now proportional ratio able unities become understandable and the first person to be able to express this in such a precise way that it has survived until our own time was Pythagoras and Pythagoras. Though born in the Aegean, he was conceived by his mother and father at Delphi, at the Oracle of Delphi. And that's why his name. Pythagoras. Because it's the Pythian Apollo. And because she conceived there, her name was changed to Pythias, a feminine form of the Pythian Apollo. But his father was Phoenician. Meniscus owned a shipping company that shipped out of tyre and tyre. As a world famous in ancient times, it was the port out of which the earliest Phoenician ships went to the west, penetrating the Mediterranean Sea in its length, so that by 800 BC they could found Carthage in North Africa across the little bit of Mediterranean from Sicily. It's where Tunisia is today, and about 100 years later founded Marseille in France and put Phoenician communities all along North Africa, all along the northern part of the Mediterranean Sea that is now France and Spain, and through the Straits of Gibraltar, down the African coast all the way to Cameroon, which is a long way down the African coast and all the way up the European coast, to the west of France, to Brittany and Normandy. All this was done before 600 BC, so that the Phoenicians were fantastic, but the nearest to them were the Greeks, because the maritime Greeks discovered things that the Phoenicians did not have, they discovered that you could do a route that would link together, not just having trading ports. The Phoenicians never made huge empires. They may have founded Carthage and Marseille that became famous later on, but their tack was to do trade only, and so they preferred to have islands off the coast. Tyre itself was an island off the coast of the eastern Mediterranean, and so they used that as a template. When Alexander the Great conquered tyre, he laid siege for about eight months, and the way he conquered it, he built a mole from the mainland out to the island of tyre and conquered it. And then he used that template when he founded Alexandria, to make a city that linked out to the island of Pharos. So the Phoenicians used that technique, what the Greeks did was an inflected different take on this. They decided that they would incorporate the highest wisdom qualities of anybody that was in contact with them. So they not only got to trade goods and have an influence on their lives, but that they would complexify and create new facets to their wisdom, to their understanding. And in Pythagoras's time, the Greek language mind took a giant order beyond what had been achieved previously in that part of the world. And as we talked about in the very first presentation, there's like a tripod of great geniuses that live at the same time, Lao Tzu in China, the historical Buddha in India, and Pythagoras in the eastern Mediterranean, Egypt, Phoenicia and Greece. Then last week we brought in a fourth figure, which turned out to be one of the keys. The fourth figure is Zoroaster, whose original name was Zarathustra. And Zarathustra lived a very long time before, but had a renaissance in the five hundreds in the sixth century BC. Because of Cyrus the Great, who then established the first of the great Persian Empires, and did it because he brought the ideas of the ancient Zarathushtra, who was from Central Asia, the Greeks called them Scythians, around where Samarkand is today in Uzbekistan and those people in Central Asia. Those ancient Aryan peoples were the first to master horses. They were the first to tame horses. And they did this very early on, and they established enormous land caravan routes going to the east like the Phoenicians, and very soon the Greeks going to the west on water. But the land caravan routes took advantage of going along rivers from ancient Samarkand, one can follow the Amu Darya all the way up until the Hindukush and the Himalaya, where they come together, and there are a couple of passes precarious. But if you know what you're doing, you can make it over. And if you drop down over, they where the Hindu Kush meets the Himalaya, you drop into the Central Asia, which is now part of China, into the vast Gobi desert region. And at the time, there was no real way to deal with the northern part of the Gobi Desert that later became the Silk Road. But about 4000 years ago, the best path was on the south. And that path I named decades ago as the Jade road because for the first time you find China no longer has kings, but has a dynasty. And the dynasty is characterized by two important things. Jade becomes the synthesizing symbol and the chariot becomes the military power. And for the first time in China, you see chariots. You do not see chariots anywhere except in Central Asia and then in China. And then you see chariots appearing about 300 years later, about 1700 BC, in Egypt for the very first time, because those Scythians, those Central Asian people, had come down through Anatolia as the Hittites and had taken over the Mideast at that time. What we're looking at are historical stages, but they are keyed in a common denominator of a wisdom understanding that stability requires for human beings to learn, to tune, to balance, to have an equanimity within themselves, and that it is very difficult to have an equanimity within yourself as an individual. But it is much easier to have an equanimity within yourself if you work it out with someone else. And so the easiest way after Pythagoras, it took about two generations to come to Plato. And Plato's dialogues are the way in which Socrates taught how to who have a pro and con about something can, if they follow together through the continuity of the pro and con, they will discover that they are making steps, that the original step will be their own pro position, their own con position. We do not agree. We agree that we do not agree. The next is that they they both almost automatically will come up with their own opinions of why they're pro or why their con is right. The Greek word for this is doxa. So that pro and con is the original polarity. Doxa comes into play to try to fortify that, but cannot because the opinions make them not just polarized into pro and con, it makes them antagonistic. I don't like what you're saying. Well, I don't like what you're saying, and I don't like who you are because you say this and even more because you believe it. Well, I feel the very same way about you. So there's an again, it's a suffering in doxa so that they learn that they have to improve their doxa, they have to improve their opinions. And so a fortified opinion from both sides now has again almost automatically taken a third step, and has refined the dialogue through a phase of polarity, through a phase of antagonism to now a phase of trying to persuade. Look, you're. You're wrong because. And I'm right because of such and thus and so. Well, that may be. But look here because of such and thus and so I believe that I'm right. Trying to persuade, finally that persuasion that third step leads to a fourth step where they realize that not only are there a pro and con and their opinion and the other's opinion even refined, but that there are many other people and they all have their opinion. They all have their ability to refine their opinion. They all have positions that may be totally different from the pro and the con originally, so that there is a complex now that is discovered in the dialogue. And the resolution of it comes in a fifth moment, the aha moment, the eureka moment where they realize that underneath all of the various positions and arguments and opinions and refined opinions, there must be a truth. The Greek term is Alicia. Just coming together to recognize that there is a truth makes truth visible. It may not be precise immediately, but it occurs to both or to all involved in this process. As long as they stay in the process together that there must be a truth. Truth must be able to come into existence. But it comes into existence out of a mysterious completeness. But the mysterious completeness could not come out of a zero. The truth must come out of a higher order. Not an original order, but a higher order which can influence the original. That higher order is consciousness, and because it is not a form, it is a process. But it's not a process like experience. It's a field of process like nature. And so consciousness becomes discovered as a field not of zero, but a field of infinity. And out of this is born a second time a rebirth. Not a reincarnation, not a transmigration of souls. Out of this is a rebirth of a new kind of being, a spirit person. And that that spirit person has not a single existential body and an individual mental mind, but has a scintillating differential quality of person able to appreciate all worlds, able to have not only the passion of existence and the refinement of feelings of a symbolic mind, but to have a compassion for each other. This is where shared presence first occurs. It is a higher dimension of tuning that leads not to the stability and equanimity of an integral cycle, but furthers the ecology of consciousness out of its field to the jewel like scintillation of spirit persons who can appreciate the beauty of all the possibilities that each other are capable of. It is not a tolerance of difference. It's an appreciation of possibilities. And so that spirit person becomes an artist, and that artist is primordially a creator of other spirit persons, so that Pythagoras, the historical Buddha. Lao-tzu Zarathustra brought back in the Renaissance as Zoroaster all at the same time, about 500 B.C., exemplify a whole threshold everywhere in that great swath of the world, where men and women became sensitized to the mysterious possibilities that go at least two dimensions beyond what were the limitations of existence before. What were the parameters of what was there in terms of symbolic thought and mental forms, ideas so that we have in the world at that time a great sensitivity, that there must be a higher learning and that that higher learning then not only produces spirit persons the art of person making as differential jewels of possibility, but that when they act, they do something different from the continuity of trying to get to the equanimity of a spoken language. They prefer to have a written language that goes with the spoken language, and that the writing of symbols that does not remain in the integral cycle, but is able to be a membrane that leads to the osmosis to the conscious dimensions, which by now it was apparent to them that there's a whole ecology of consciousness, like there's a cycle to nature, there's an ecology to consciousness, and that what men and women do now, consciously, as persons, they generate a new kind of flow, not just the stream of myth, but the kaleidoscopic delta systems of history. And so one of the remembered sayings of Pythagoras, he said, geometry is history. Why would geometry be history? Because one can learn not from lines and a kind of a high school form of geometry. But one can learn that one can take the locus of no dimension when it moves. It only describes a line. But the line has an infinite number of planes. So there can be a complex, not just a plane plain geometry, but there can be a geometry of the whole sphere of all the possible planes, so that now geometry becomes capable of ratioed functions and becomes trigonometry. And as soon as you get to a trigonometry, you begin to understand that you can understand precisely to any degree of specificity, how to deal with functions. And the primordial function becomes within reach. It's only one step away. The primordial function is the relationship of 0 to 1, and when that is appreciated, one now has calculus, an integral and a differential calculus, and you can literally figure out almost anything in terms of its time, its space, its precision. We understood for a long time that calculus was invented by two geniuses at the same time, in the late 1600s, Sir Isaac Newton in his Principia mathematica of 1687, and G.W. Leibniz, who was left a in a court semi-exile in Hanover, Germany. He had been a superb mathematical genius and a polymath, and he had made the mistake of being too good at this, and he was dealing with the wife educating her and the daughter educating her. The wife's name was Sophia, and Sophia's husband became George, the King of England. That's how the House of Hanover got to England, and George to not let Leibniz continue his influence over his wife and daughter, left him in Germany to be the librarian. Leibniz also came to understand calculus, but from a different angle from Newton. Because when he was 20 years old and he was in the Netherlands, Leibniz happened to look up a philosopher Jewish philosopher who had been exiled from the Jewish community because he no longer believed in the limitations of formal Judaism. His name was Spinoza, and Spinoza is. Some of his friends were Jesuits. Can you imagine a Jew having Jesuit friends in the Netherlands who had just returned from China, had just returned because the Netherlands and Indonesia were always very close early on, and they had translated a Chinese book called the I Ching into Latin, and Leibniz was the first person in the West to read the Latin translation of the Ching and to understand. Wait a minute. It's not about tah, it's about tah and tae, not about yin and yang. It's not about a polarity that has to find an equanimity. It's about a cycle of ecology where the equanimity is multiplied and one begins to understand that if you can have infinitesimal accuracy between 0 and 1, which is a integral calculus. At the same time, you will have its complementarity, which is not so much going from 1 to 0, but actually going one to infinity. And now you have a very interesting thing because Leibnitz, his notation is the one that was adopted for the mathematics of calculus. His language. Newton called them fluxions, and he had a clumsy kind of gerrymandered language. Very, very difficult to understand, almost impossible to understand. The really great editions of the Principia were only done about 300 years later. I.b. Cohen, who founded the History of Science department at Harvard right at the end of his life, produced a masterful translation of Newton, showing that it can be understood, but it's very, very difficult. If you come to shared presence by the idea of it, you will have such a complex, gerrymandered structure that it will be almost distasteful to try and think of going through understanding it again. But if we come to it through the ecology of consciousness woven back into the integral cycle of nature that weaving produces a beauty and the mystery becomes beauty. And so one gets the poetic phrase in one of Keats's poems. Beauty is truth, and truth is beauty. That's all you really know. That's all you really need to know that they interchange centers. That at the center of the integral, there is a secret exchange by a pre primordial tuning with the center of infinity, which is anywhere it needs to be that the center of the circle, the center of the square, the center of the sphere, is an integral point. But if it is a point of no dimension, if it is a locus of no dimension, then the integral center can be anywhere as well, which means that it has accepted as a gift the infinite possibilities, and in exchange, the infinite possibilities. Acquire not a present point, but a presence quality that can be at home anywhere it is, it does not matter that you don't own all that terrain and it's controlled from here. It's that you're at home, anywhere in the terrain with anyone else who is in that mode. And so now you have a new basis of community based on the resonance of spiritual persons, which immediately discloses that you could work out through the kaleidoscopic dimensions of history a relationality, a ratio tonality, a proportionality with the cosmos. And so in Pythagoras, you find for the first time a discursive use of the term cosmos with a k the kosmos is able to gift its infinity fertility to Mother Nature, who may be zero field, but who is a fertile zero field, and she can birth anything, especially existence, especially a living existence, especially a living existence that can transform itself to what becomes now real, the reality. And so you find that shared presence some 2500 years ago underwent a massive step up a threshold of creating a membrane. And it took about 500 years. And all of those cases for the different areas to work out in their own way, in their own histories, how to refine this further so that one can talk now, 500 years later in China, in India, in the Persian, in the Greek Egyptian areas of the world, one can talk about the spirit person having a son or daughter, relation to the mother or the father, cosmos the father, cosmos, the mother nature. So that one now becomes capable of an eternal life, because the conditions of liminality have stretched the liminality into infinity and do not perish at zero ness. One finds then, about 500 years after that, about a thousand years, a millennia after the original threshold, a new threshold, a new time form, which is the birth of Zen. That zero does not eliminate, that infinity does not drowned, and that we as higher dimensional persons are at home, everywhere and anywhere. Let's take a break. Let's come back. We're trying to give a shape to the history of consciousness, which led to an enormous refinement 2000 years ago. Jesus was so refined that he could refine Buddhism into the Mahayana. Jesus was so refined that he could refine Pythagoras and Plato and those dialogues into the Hermetic dialogues. The reach of those transforms was so powerful. That they, hermetic transforms, were able to go into Islam and transform Islam into Sufi Sufism, into the Sufi wisdom. And the Mahayana was so powerful that it could go into China and create a Chan Buddhism, which became Zen, was Zen and later the China India France met and produced the Vajrayana. So that there are huge transforms and also the transform of Jesus in the Celtic religious area. Ireland, Wales, Scotland, the West of Britain transformed that so much that it in a delayed time. We'll talk more about it next week, produced a very esoteric understanding of the way several hundred years before Christianity formally was introduced from London, and always considered that it was the Church of England where there had already been, uh, 400 years of following a way which was quite, uh, more primordial and resurfaced then in the following century in the court of King Arthur as a very esoteric understanding, and 500 years later, in another cycle at the millennial cusp of it produced the Arthurian literature, which not only was there in England, in Britain, but was on the continent as well. That was called the matter of Britain as a phrase. It was there in France. It was there in Germany. It was there in links that only somebody understanding the Hermetic tradition would be able to understand how it worked together, but almost no one pieced together how it was that the Grail became the mystical bow by which it was all tied together. But when it was not understood, and you, miss, pulled the bow, it turned into a knot. And so the Grail mystery was always the difficult sticking point until a woman came along who was magisterially brilliant and who was at home on the continent as well as in England. Her name was Jessie L Weston, and over a long lifetime managed to track down that the original context out of which the Grail stories came was the ancient Near East. That somehow that's the primordial source from which they came. And before, uh, just a couple of more presentations, I'll be able to show exactly how that worked out, not only in the Arthurian Grail of the West, but also in the Greek of the Near East of the India. Not only Buddhism in its Mahayana and eventually Vajrayana, but also in its effect recursively on Hinduism and in China. How Taoism and Confucianism and Buddhism came together about 1500 A.D. as something called Neo-Confucianism, but it was a bringing together of the three of them on the basis of an esoteric Christianity. So we're looking at a large swath of world wisdom, and we're trying to understand that there is an ecology of consciousness available to us that is no longer just a little trail. It's no longer a royal road. It's like a 30 lane freeway. It is very easy to convey now to any number of people, in quite limited time, what the human heritage is on the planet of wisdom, and to be able to attune persons step by step, stage by stage, so that they, in their own way, will be able to participate in the ratios of the real, as I say. Now, last week I brought in my translation of the Gothis of Zarathustra that I spent more than ten years on. And one of the things that I did was to test whether my English translation and Zarathushtra wrote an ancient Avesta, which is a primordial Indo-European language going back 4000 years. But they contemporary Zoroastrians are Persian, or they're from Bombay, India, in which they are called Parsis. So I had an audience of Parsis and Zoroastrians from Persia, and my English translation of Zarathustra was translated into Farsi by my friend Homa Ghahremani. And that Farsi translation was read to Parsis and Zoroastrians, and they were able to hear Zarathushtra's wisdom from that. Now, anybody who's tried to do a translation to another language knows how steep and slippery and difficult it is to do that, but to do multiple translations and still have it come out alive and conscious and coherent is something that one tries for all one's life. Presentation three has a number of the poems they're individually called hots, and the hots come together in sets called Yajnas and the Yajnas come together in to larger sets called VAT. And we need to go back and hear. Now, in terms of this morning's presentation from the 29th yajna from the 10th hot in that yajna. This is how 4000 years ago, Zarathustra poetically put it. You, Ahura, energize all giving Asha and Kshatra to and with you vohuman peace. And in this rest you bestow even as I unify with Mazda, my mind achieves primordiality the incredible, concise, beautiful, poetic. To be able to express this is one of the high water marks of Zarathustra and its revival as Zoroaster, and one of the peculiarities is little recognized except just recently that. Pythagoras, when he was about 20 years old, went to study in Egypt, and he spent 22 years in Egypt. He went to the Heliopolitan priests. Heliopolis is now a suburb of Greater Cairo, but at that time Egypt was had been taken over by the Persian Empire. And he was able quite easily. Then, after 22 years of study in Egypt, to study another 11 years in Persia, where he studied under the aegis of the Renaissance revival of Zoroaster. And so you find in Pythagorus a incredible realization that his learning was not only Greek and Phoenician and Egyptian, but had an ancient, not a Persian, but had an ancient Iranian quality of wisdom before there was an Iran back to the original Zarathushtra's time. So that one has an interesting kind of book. This was published in 1971 by the great M.L. West, who was a Hessian scholar, and it's called Early Greek Philosophy and the Orient, published by Oxford University Press. And in it there is a series of seven chapters, and three of the seven chapters are on a younger contemporary of Pythagoras named Heraclitus, and the seventh chapter is The Gift of the Magi, where the Magi around 500 BC because of the revival of Zarathustra as Zoroaster. Zoroaster means stargazer, aster, asterix and asterism, and Zorro means the ability not only to see, but to gaze. Now a gaze is not a trance. A wisdom gaze is a continuity of seeing into something. And when you do this, perception does not just register as like cause and effect, but that at every turn of the spiral of continuing gazing goes deeper and deeper, like an auger. And that that auger goes into the perception in such a way that it accumulates many perceptions together. So one then has a phenomenon called accumulated perception. An accumulated perception is not something that just sees and identifies or doesn't identify, but accumulates the moments of perception so that they are now layered and the layering of it obviates making simple cause and effect relationships, and brings in the gestalt, where consciousness has an easier time to add its fifth dimension so that someone who trains themselves to look at the night sky, at the stars learns to see that the stars can be through accumulated penetration, put into constellations. And because those constellations become a gestalt familiar, it became possible about 1800 B.C. in Mesopotamia, where Iraq is today, where southern Iran is today, it became possible. By 1800 BC, to see that certain constellations follow the sun, and that in the course of the year the sun will go through a series of 12 constellations in a cycle all the time. This was the birth of astrology. That the 12 constellations of heaven are like, related to a thousand years before 2800 B.C., the 12 gates of the underworld. Ancient Egyptian, um uh, lore and mythology and theology, cosmology were that there were 12 gates to the netherworld, and at each gate there was a gatekeeper. And the gatekeeper would give you a no pass stopping threshold, and the only way to penetrate through that was to know the magic language for that gate specifically. And then you would be let through. So that magic language spells, they were always called. They're like forerunners of mantras. If you knew the right sequence of the magic language so that you had mastered the set, you were able to go through all 12 gates of the nether world, and the nether world could not retain you. You would be able to rise again in the morning as the sun was coming up. You would be a companion, like a son of the sun. And you would rise with the sun. And because now you were experienced at being able to do this, you would know how to go through the underworld every night and rise with the next day. And because you could do this indefinitely, you now lived in eternity. The discovery that there were 12 constellations to the sun meant that the night not only had its 12 constellations in the other netherworld, but it had its matching set in the upper world, so that if you could learn that passing through the nether world, you could also now learn passing through the upper world. And if you could do so, you could not only live again with the sun, but you could be reborn into life again as a new person. And because you had all of this within your capacity, if you mastered them together and they were tuned together, reality became eternity for you. The ecology of consciousness was your way of adding the missing dimensions that the four dimensions of time space in the cycle of nature were distinct because they had spaces in between them, and the four dimensions of the ecology of consciousness fit into those spaces because the spaces of the ecology of consciousness were exactly the spaces of the dimensions of time space, so that if you brought your hands together in prayer, this was a new mudra, a new symbol that you participated in the tuning of the whole. And you were capable of being real. Now, this was a shared presence in two distinct ways. One was that people that now prayed together and sang together were together. They were together in wholeness. They were together having the capacity to pass together through all of the portals. Any quality of being able to be hindered in nature, inequality, of being able to be hindered in consciousness. And so they were delivered. That's the language that we hear so frequently that it seems glib, but to be delivered, meant to be delivered into the real. This was a quality that shows up, especially in Pythagoras, but in particular in a younger contemporary of his named Heraclitus, Heraclitus of Ephesus. And we will see as we go on that Ephesus is extremely important. We have to understand something about Heraclitus, about Ephesus, about that section of the eastern shore of the Aegean Sea. In ancient times it was called Asia minor. Today it's called Turkey. In ancient times it was called Ionia. And the reason why is called Ionia. Is because of a great figure named ion, who in ancient times was descended from a king of Athens named Codrus. But what's interesting is that when you go into ancient Greek history, Codrus would have been a king of Athens around the same time that Solomon was king in Judea about 1000 BC, and a friend of Solomon's was King Hiram of Tyre, and another friend of Solomon's was Queen of Sheba. So the Queen of Sheba. King Solomon. King Hiram of Tyre and King Codrus of Athens are all contemporaries. It's another threshold. But what's interesting is that Codrus was not born in Attica, in Athens. He was born in Pylos. Now Pylos is on the far west coast of Greece, and that body of water that's now called the Adriatic Sea was not called the Adriatic Sea, but was called the Ionian Sea. And the Ionian Sea spread from the coast of Greece to the coast of Sicily and southern Italy. That was the Ionian Sea. So that Ionia was developed as colonies from Athens, but the original colonizer was not an Attica person, not an original Athenian person, but was not only from Pylos, but was from the royal family of Pylos, which the original king was Neleus, and the son of Neleus was Nestor. And in the Trojan War, Nestor was the closest friend to Ulysses, and after being missing for 20 years and Ulysses son now being 21, when he went to try to discover what had happened to his father, he went down to Pylos to talk to Nestor, who had come back from the Trojan Wars. And Nestor said, why don't you take my son with you and go in search of your father? In meantime, I'll see what I can do. And so the ancient Ithaca and the ancient Pylos were tuned together. They were very close. Nestor and Ulysses and both their sons. About 200 years later, Codrus had to leave Pylos because another group of Greeks called the Dorian Greeks came down in an invasion, and they took over that part of Greece and let them go. As long as they would clear out of not only the area, but far away. And so they went all the way around the Peloponnese, and they went up to an island called Long Island, called Boeotia. And their king Codrus, in single combat, overcame the king of Boeotia. And because Boiotia was very close to Attica, the king of Attica in Athens gave up his throne to King Codrus. And King Codrus showed his courage, because the Dorians by this time had followed to see where he went, he would go to some place that was fertile, and so they were following him to see where he would go, so they could take that over as well, like Cylons in Battlestar Galactica, the Dorians were were rather tough. Um, they were not barbarians, but they were capable of barbaric things. The Delphic Oracle had predicted in a riddle that was released secretly to Codrus that the only way the Dorians could conquer Attica and Athens was if they did not kill him and let him go again. So Codrus disguised himself as a woodcutter and went out and picked a fight with the Dorian warriors who killed him, and it saved Athens and saved Attica, so that the sons of Codrus became very famous as being, uh, having the courage not only of traditional royalty, but having the self-sacrifice of of great genes, as we would say today. And so one of the sons, Andros, under Klaus, founded the first colony in Ionia, and that was in Ephesus. So that Heraclitus, 500 years later, is a descendant of that royal blood. And his family were the traditional kings, the most famous courageous kings in Ionia, in Ephesus. And what's peculiar is that when you come to read the fragments of Heraclitus, his book was a holy book and was not written to be published. But he placed the copy, the copy of the book in the Great Temple of Artemis that his family founded and built and constructed in Ephesus. Because nearby, about 20 miles away on the island of Samos, just outside the gulf where Ephesus is a big temple to Hera was being built. The Heraion and the great Artemisium was built to be larger and more splendorous than it was. And because Ephesus became far more important as a trading city, and Samos really never became a great city like Ephesus, when they rebuilt the temple to Artemis, it was the largest Greek temple ever built. It was more than 900ft long, and he put Heraclitus put his book in the temple as like the sacred text treasure. Only fragments of it exist, and it was famous in antiquity for being obscure, and so Heraclitus was called the obscure because his language, we would now say, be able to say, was so jewel like in its scintillation of possible meanings, that there was no way for anyone to limit it and characterize it. Definitely, because it always had more and more meanings. The more that you got out of it, the more there was there. So that Heraclitus became the other side of a great pre-Socratic philosopher named Parmenides. Parmenides came up with the logical conundrum that only two states really exist. What is is. What isn't. Isn't. And that logically, they cannot meet. It's like two electrons are not supposed to meet. They're not supposed to pair. Whereas Heraclitus was the other side of that. That it isn't that what is is and what isn't isn't don't meet. It's that they meet infinitesimally all the time, so that it is a continuity that is mysterious. One of the short sayings of Heraclitus that came down in philosophy classes was that Parmenides gave the stoic separation. Heraclitus gave the mystical continuity. He said, you can never step into the same stream twice. It is always changing, but there is a continuity in the changing ness of it. And that that continuity has a peculiar quality to it. Here's how the fragments of Heraclitus begin. This is from the great translation of a Charles Kahn. Cambridge University Press. Although this account holds forever, men ever failed to comprehend both before hearing it and once they have heard. Although all things come to pass in accordance with this account, men are like the untried when they try such words and works as I set forth. Distinguishing each according to its nature and telling how it is. But other men are oblivious of what they do, awake, just as they are forgetful of what they do. Asleep. Not comprehending. They hear like the deaf. The saying is their witness absent while present all they although the account is shared. Most men live as though their thinking were a private possession. Now you can hear it in the context of how I teach, and you could recognize why a great many, most people coming for the first time or first couple of times do not hear what is being said, because it is not being said in the form that invites being heard in that way. It invites jumping over the impossible conundrums in a graceful leap of continuity that is mysterious. Most men do not think things in the way they encounter them, nor do they recognize what they experience but believe their own opinions. Then a fragment of Heraclitus jumps into large scale realization. There is a great year whose winter is a great flood, and whose summer is a world conflagration. In these alternating periods, the world is now going up in flames, now turning to water. This cycle consists of 10,800 years. Now, when you come to understand and have heard this, you have to realize that this was written 2500 years ago. If you add 2500 years to 10,800 years, you get 13,300 years, which was the last time that the glacial period of the Paleolithic had any kind of traction, because after that, the ice retreated all over the northern part of the earth, and Paleolithic man came out of the caves. The last great Paleolithic cave was in France near about 13,000 years ago. And instead of finding that one had to go under the ice, under the earth, into another world in order to participate in the mysteries in a Paleolithic way. Men and women 13,000 years ago were able to come out from under the ground, under the skies, under the sun, under the stars, and begin to build up, rather than going down and building in caves. They came up onto the surface of the earth day and night and began to build up. They began to build buildings. They began to build places where they gathered together to have their festivals together under the sun in the open air, under the stars. One of the great distinguishing marks of Homer is that the Homeric gods are on top of Mount Olympus, not under the earth. That Homeric festivals are held in the open air, in the sunlight, like the Olympian Games. And that, like the Olympian Games held every four years. It's a cycle of four. It's the square of the pair of pairs. And so the Olympian Games became the metronome by which history was kept track of that. Such and such a thing happened in such and such an Olympiad. Heraclitus was born in the 69th Olympiad. It's about 542 BC. So that history now Historia became a way of having a conscious, like a seventh dimension way of understanding the complex processes of a kaleidoscopic consciousness generated by spirit persons who were able to influence and mature the symbolic individuality and indeed reach all the way back to the existential phenomenality and transform that as well. So that somebody who was raised from the phenomenal body through the symbolic thought to the spiritual, prismatic person, was thrice greatest and thrice greatest, meant that they were not only transformed, but they were transformed twice. The first transform was by having the field of differential consciousness be quintessential for them. The second transformation was a distillation of that through the prismatic ability of their spirit persons, so that they were not only at home now as a thrice greatest persons, they were at home in the cosmos as well. That the cosmos was like a fourth state was the eternal life. So that by having the Olympiads in every four years, one had the metronome of now being able to establish a transform of mythic tradition into the Historia, which became a geometry in the sense that one learned. This is how this pattern plays out, and if we are conscious and participate in it in a creative way so that persons are really spiritual. And if we distill in a historical way so that they are also at home in the cosmos, then history will not repeat its cycles, but will improve. And so the improvement of man was not just a reforming and wasn't even limited to revolutions or satisfied with simply renaissances. But as I have called this work in this time, it's a recalibration to be at home, both in the zero field and the infinite field, but able to function freely together. In what is not in betweens, but which is harmonic resonances that can be tuned. If you've ever seen a piano tuner, they come in with a little case that has a whole set of tuning forks. They will tune the whole piano so that whatever music you play on that instrument will have its musicality possibility. Not only that, but someone like an Arnold Schoenberg, who in 1911 published his theory of Harmony Great Big English Translation, published by University of California Press. Schoenberg said, now we are mature enough to understand that dissonances are simply super long, uh, resonances. And one can learn to hear the music of what before was dissonance as a new music. In other of this came the 12 tone scale, which is very similar to the 12 constellations of astrology, or the 12 Gates of the netherworld, or the 12 Tribes, or the 12 hours of the day. It is a way in which the Proportioning now is able to be given a set that has a particular way of organizing so that you can reorganize your organizing. You can participate in an ecology that extends back into a cycle, and includes the cycle in the ecology, so that you have a new understanding. It's not that there are two cycles that need to be made commensurate. It's that the second cycle, the ecology, invites the cycle to auger in and auger out at the same time so that you have a double helix, a double spiral. And this is exactly how DNA works. But to carry it, to make it fertile, there needs to be a single spiral that can elicit out of the matrix of the context its complement. And so the single spiral RNA is able to produce its complement out of the bio plasma soup of context. And one gets a new being and life is like this works precisely like this. With many mysteries and many new possibilities. I will bring next week the original volume that James D Watson wrote on the molecular biology of the gene. It's a little paperback. The second edition was a very large paperback. I'll bring that as well. The third edition was so large it had to be two big volumes and a bound. And now we're on the sixth edition. It is a super complex. Our ability to understand specificity does not close down, but opens up the analytic so that the cosmos encourages an analytic like art and encourages the aesthetic and the aesthetic and the analytic are resonantly related to each other in an ecological way. Not only is green beautiful, it can be understood analytically to any degree of specificity is not simply a good idea. It is further dimensions of our emergence into the real. More next week.