Presentation 9

We come to our ninth presentation, and we're looking at the ancient quality of presence and how presence is shareable. One of the most enduring rituals of shared presence over the last 2000 years is the communion in the mass. In the Christian church. And we'll be taking a look at that in a historical detail that has not been revealed before, and is central to understanding that the origins of a very high order of shared presence indeed have a lot to do with the Last Supper, especially brought to the symbol of the Grail. But before we do, we need to go back to the origins of the origins. We need to go back, first of all, 4000 years ago to two contemporaries. One of them was Abraham. The other was Zarathustra. Both born about 2000 BC. Both of them only towards the end of their first, almost first century of life, were able to bring forth what has become archetypal for Abraham. He was 100 years old before he had his son Isaac, by his wife Sarah Sarai, and as soon as she had her pregnancy in old age, Isaac founded the patriarchal lineage that culminates in the Torah. In the first book, Genesis, and establishes the Jewish tradition for the first time. Tradition says that Abraham's father, Terah, was a maker of idols. He made images of the moon god because the family had lived in ur for untold centuries, and Abraham himself was born in ur of the Chaldees. We know that in the background that the high priestess of er about 2300 BC, about 300 years before Abraham was born, was an a duana, who was the daughter of Sargon of Akkad, who established the first what we would call today international empire that spread in complicated trade routes from the Indus River system in India to the Aegean islands like Cyprus at used to be called the Fertile Crescent. When you took the inner part of it, going from the Persian Gulf up the Euphrates Tigris River and over to the Mediterranean coast. That fertile crescent is the image of the Isis moon, which then ushers in a new quality of life. And the excellence of the new quality of life is the ability for a language to raise its poetic order out of the mythic flow into the artistic prism. The artist is prismatic, whereas the myth teller is traditionally experiential fanciful. There are always different versions of myths they keep reoccurring in whatever versions, thematically with variability. And this is a consistent quality of an integral natural cycle. Myths always go back to a field of nature that is mitigated by the forms of ritual. Whereas the forms of art are not integral, they are differential. They are not pragmatic. It is not that you just do, but they are prismatic in that you have a range of possibilities that could be so that. Abraham, in the high poetic of Moses in the Torah, is making a prismatic case for a new quality of mankind, and the quality is that Abraham is a friend of God. He is not compelled to worship out of ritual. He is a friend of God, and that this friendship is such that he is able to envision in a special way, angelic messengers, as if they were men like himself. Uh, they. Three angels that appear. On their way to Sodom and Gomorrah. To destroy it for its iniquity are seen as if they were other men, and they are invited to come and rest under the shade of a tree on Abraham's land, and to partake of food and of drink, and to rest themselves. And he talks to divine beings as if they were confreres. And there is no trepidation whatsoever that one is in any kind of mythical situation. One is in a visionary field that nature's field has now been transformed into a visionary field, and that Abraham is able to live personally at home in that visionary field so that the angels. Talk with him as if there was an event coming up that he could ask about the destruction. What about the innocent lives? If there are 50 people, would you, in Sodom and Gomorrah? Would you consider not destroying them? Yes. If there were even ten, would you reconsider if there were even one? Would you not destroy them? No, we will not. And they were destroyed because the only good man in Sodom, Gomorrah was lot, who was a nephew of Abraham, and he was alerted to leave with his two daughters. And they're the only ones that survived because they were not in the cities and no one left. Uh, had a virtue in either the field of nature or the field of vision. The contemporary of Abraham is Zarathustra. And it's interesting because the beginnings of Judaism are also the beginnings of the higher religious quality of Iran. And so in our day in 2009, nearing the summer that Israel and Iran should be almost at nuclear loggerheads after 4000 years of a tuned sharing origin that is very peculiar. And to also note that Zarathustra was from Central Asia, from what is today Uzbekistan, around Samarkand and the large river system, there was the Amu Darya, sometimes called the Oxus in older geographies, but was not well received after, at age 30, he had a vision very much like Abraham, having his visionary encounter with the angels of the presence of God. He went to the river to get water, to make holy through mantras, to put into the sacrifice. And when he came up from the water, he looked at the bank and he could see a divine being. The lord Ahura Mazda. And that Ahura Mazda to him was a tuned pair that had a single flame of actuality, so that the radiance of Mazda had a conjunct chiral rotational double rotational brilliance of Ahura, and he saw Ahura Mazda as a friend. And those men and women who became the first to take up the new way of zarathushtra. We're actually called the Noble friends. The Avesta. The Avestan language translates very clearly that aria means noble, and that the noble friends are that at this level of emerging from a field of vision, like emerging from a field of nature. One exists emerging from a field of vision. One has presence which is shareable with the divine. At age 30, Zarathushtra changed his entire life. He realized that the old rituals were dominated by false authorities, by bickering princes in their little fiefdoms, and he began a completely new life with a new wife. And for ten years he wandered on the long caravan routes that went from the Caspian Sea all the way to the Gobi Desert. And it was about this time that two great transformations happened written language acquired for the first time a facility to have an alphabet. And there are a number of alphabets, and we'll talk about some of them, including the ancient Irish Ogham alphabet, uh, including the origins of Greek, including the origins of Hebrew, that all of these languages came out of a very special refinement of the early cuneiform wedge. Um, markings by a stylus on clay clay tablets about the size of a palm of a hand, so that one held the clay tablets in the palm of the hand with the stylus to make the cuneiform, uh, written language. But it was a clumsy language, and very difficult. It was easy for its original making, which was for keeping track of business, keeping track of business, where there were so many different languages on these long caravan routes of Sargon's empire, so many different languages, so many different kinds of money that the early way of keeping the records was to have a little clay pouch with little figures of what it was that you were selling. If they were animals, if they were ingots, and you would put these in the little clay pouch and you would this would be your bill of sale. This would be your record of the trade. Writing came about because instead of putting little icons in the pouch, the pouch was sealed and the cuneiform significance was stylized on the outside of the pouch. And so the earliest written languages literally were in the palm of your hand, and thus the hand shake with the wrists was the sealing of the deal, because one had exchanged the record of it. The clasping of the right hands together was a final farewell at the end of life. And so they, grasping of the wrists together, was sealing the deal. The shaking of the right hands was sealing the life. The written language that first came in alphabets came from a city called Ugarit, which was on the eastern Mediterranean coast, not very far from where ancient Antioch was located. That language came into play about the time of Abraham and Zarathustra in a very big way. And They got This of Zarathustra, written in Avestan, is one of the first alphabet languages in that swath of Asia that goes from the Caspian into China. And why we have been putting an emphasis on trying to. Here in my translations, both Zarathushtra's Gathers and Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching, because the other great development that occurred, along with the development of alphabets about 2000 BC, was the development of dynasties in China. Dynastic China is a different order because instead of now having kings and various kingdoms, one now had a lineage that could be passed on and it became dynastic, and that was a gift from the Central Asian zarathushtrian ancient Irani quality. There is a very large book published about 80 years ago. I'll bring a copy of it next week. Of all the. It's about 500 pages listing all of the plants that were introduced to China from ancient Central Asia. Uh, fruit trees like the peach and the pear. Um, flowers like the rose. All of these were introduced to China about the same time, about the time of Zarathustra, whose caravans would have been running all this way from where Uzbekistan is today to the farthest reaches of the Gobi Desert, just as it began to enter into the still the west of China. But right at the gateway, there is a pass where they Huang Ho, the yellow River makes a big sweep up into a separating Inner Mongolia from Outer Mongolia and then swoops back down, and the Huang Ho goes alongside a mountain range that caused it to curl down. And right there was a pass. And that pass was the entrance to the western Paradise of China in China. Like in Egypt, the Paradise was in the West, whereas in Iran, the Paradise is a park which man has refined out of nature, has put fruit trees and flowers, has cultivated them. And so the old Persian word Paradise is what we we have. Zarathustra and Abraham then tune alphabets to lineages so that there is a written record that is passed on, which becomes the lineage of a history. And so alphabets and lineages together create the first really continuous histories, which then are not passed on in a mythic mode, but passed on in a written language mode that requires of one that you have a visionary capacity that you use the same letters over and over again, but in different combinations, in different words and words that then make the sentences, make what we would call, uh, paragraphs. And the earliest kind of record of this was to do it poetically because it was a poetic creativeness. What distinguishes the field of consciousness from the field of nature is that the field of nature is spontaneously creative, whereas the field of consciousness has a remembering quality that goes with its creative imagining. And if one can braid together creative imagining, not the imagination, but the higher order of a new process of the imagination so that it becomes creative. Imagining and art forms come out of this instead of having a ritual clanging of sound, one now is able to have a real music, and instead of having mythic figures, one is able to take metaphorical possibilities of them and to begin to create a poetry so that when we come to just two of the hots, two of the little poems of Zarathustra, this is from the Goths. Uh, the first seven Goths constitute a set of seven. For like the seven heavenly bodies, the. They are six lines each. The next four have only five lines each, and the second four after that have only four lines each. And then there is a final gatha by itself that has only three lines each, but has exactly twice as many hats as the first seven have. The first, Gaza number 28, has 11 sections of six lines. The last Gaza of 51 has 22 sections of three lines each. So if you fold the last gatha, it will be a tunable pair with the first gossip. So Zarathushtra's Gathas have 16 parts divided 7441, so that the seven and the one are like a masterful parentheses, holding an inner four which make an eight, and that inner eight and that outer eight are related in such a way that the final gatha circulates back, so that one is able to begin the gothas again, like a spiraling in, and clearly also a spiraling out, so that one begins to become familiar and understand what the authors are saying. Singing about this is a. Example of two of the five line poems. The hats in the 45th Gatha. Again, I speak of life's first beginning, which in my insight, Mazda told to Ahura. Those of you not exact in Manthra don't attain. And to this I conceive and now also speak for them is woeful and ever an ending. Now I speak of life lived at its best. Asha through Mazda knows that which creates fatherless is really the best effective mind. So thus his daughter is in good deeds are mighty and never is illusion in all seeing Ahura. So that one is born. Reborn out of the field of vision, as one has been birthed out of the field of nature into existence that is capable of experience, that is capable of being integrated together to make a symbolic thought. Now the field of consciousness gives us a rebirth, a way of coming back within our life to a higher dimensional ecology. The. Difficulty for us is that our education is largely based upon a symbolic interpretation of mythic experience founded on ritual comportments. Whereas the higher learning was a learning of history through the prismatic works of art and the prism persons of artists who were reborn out of the field of vision. If one goes back even further than 4000 years ago. And the simplest way to do this is to just compute from 2000 AD back to zero AD zero BC the time of Jesus go back 2000 more years to Zarathustra and Abraham, and then 2000 years before that. 4000 BC is the proverbial time of Adam and Eve. So that one learns to go into time forms, and that the time forms have exact shapes and the way to express it is not through the mythic experience flow, but through the prismatic, bringing together of forms that are differentially brilliant. One then has history as a kaleidoscopic flow rather than as the stream of experience. It is now The possibilities. Of many kinds of experience, including experiment. And it's out of the experiment. Additional spectrums of historical consciousness that science is able to come out and complement in a tuned way with the forms of art, the forms of science and the forms of art are related together harmonically. Arithmetic is a language of symbol ritual counting. Mathematics is a poetic language of science, much like musical notation is an artistic language, you cannot imagine any two languages closer than music and mathematics. In fact, usually architects of a world class quality will also see that there the mathematics of their architecture is in fact the expression of the beauty. If we go back 20,000 years ten times, we go back to a Paleolithic range of vision, and we are able to do that because the discovery of the New World, ostensibly 500 years ago, gave us exposure to a large several continent population of people who were still able to function in a Paleolithic way, though they would have some Neolithic enclaves, they were still at home. The central North American experience of this in east of the Mississippi River was to have earth mounds, and literally all of the land between the Atlantic and the Mississippi River was tattooed by various kinds of earth mounds, um, sometimes geometric, sometimes animal shaped. The most famous that you will find is the Great Serpent Mound along the Ohio River. Of the serpent that is about 1300 feet long and its mouth is open, and there is a sun that is there in the mouth of the serpent going back, an ancient Palaeolithic symbol and image. On the other side of the Mississippi, going west in the Great Plains, it was the sun, not in earth mounds, but the sun in a sun dance on the summer solstice. That was the focus. And the Algonquin word for the sun dance is Okan. And I wrote a poem called Okan in eight sections for the summer solstice in 1981. I used to observe the solstices at the Philosophical Research Society here in Los Angeles, and the collection of the first six of them is in a poetic book of mine, six Summer solstice. This is how my poem oaken began in 1981, and this is about. The origin of the dance takes place in mid-winter by a vow of a holy woman, of a, of a woman, of the tribe, who vows to keep a continuity of holiness all the way through the ceremony. The eight day ceremony. Here is a little bit of the poem. She lay on the open prairie when flushed grasses bent due south. And the big sky spanned each horizon. Completely. She lay looking up. Intent. Those sky beings spread before her. Feelings of uplift soaring on the wind. Wings wide. She must a big bird be. This earth fell back, receding below the soaring span to each horizon. And in the updraft floated free. Her heart leapt to see blue space all over. And there so high she saw a star in midday sun. A star small and bright, hermetic, guided light cased in pure space to mark the further zenith for her life. Though sky being spread before her feelings of uplift. Soaring on the wind, wings wide, she and Eagle flying free. The midday star never wavered. Once star and sun double celestial sight she saw the movement of Earth in new view, each patterning double marked. Now the Earth's people pressed and pushed by confusion in the close by places, but pattern in the sun's big season and patterned more by star guide light those sky beings spread before her thinking in the updraft wind wide her eyes, her vision to wind free. And there so high the blue sky space wrapped round her form. As closing from the vision pattern. Triple vision. Earth and Sun and Star. All three. A new home she had one of sky blue space with dusty stars doubled on the base and eagles spread above the rose toward the midday star crusted on this teepees tip. We're going to take a break. The Okan is committed to by a woman who will maintain for the half year, from the winter to the summer solstice, an unbroken continuity of holy presence which will host the sun dance Sundance. Her presence, continuity capacity is the holy space within which the not only the Tribes Sundance, but anyone who is invited will be a part of it. Um. The last Okan was held in 1961. Uh, just east of Calgary, Alberta, at the Blackfoot tribal headquarters at Gleason, Alberta. It was the last because to make any holy instrument to be used in a holy space. In the Algonquin Paleolithic. Thematic regularity. It took four shaman together to focus the energies, so that that implement would be able to function in reality in that space within space. That holy space, within the natural space. That visionary space within the natural space. And there were not four holy men shaman left in all of the plains Algonquin tribes, and most of the implements had been put into museums in Toronto, in Montreal, in Calgary, Edmonton, in Vancouver, in Washington, D.C. and so the Blackfoot Nation invited all of the Plains tribes, the Sarcee, the Stoney, uh, the Bloods to participate in this last Okan, and it was filmed by a Canadian film crew out of the Alberta museum in Calgary. And I used to use that when I was teaching in Canada for many years, and actually brought the Okan film down to the Philosophic Research Society when I began lecturing there in a continuous way in 1980. When we come back from the break, we'll take a look at how the creation of a shared presence is only possible if the holy space has a special kind of membrane ceiling to it. It is sealed from the world, opened to the higher dimensions of worlds without end, and only if that can be maintained. Is the entire ceremony efficacious? And we will take a look at the way in which they Algonquin language group of American North American Indians. They Algonquin language was spoken from the Atlantic coast to the Rocky Mountains. All those tribes of 4000 miles. It is the plains and woodlands and north New England down to where Washington, D.C. is Virginia. All of that swath had the same language family with an intersperse of the Iroquoian languages. It's important to see that a spoken language must be available to be raised out of its mythic flow into the oceanic pooling of possibilities, and the transform of doing that is through a written language. But the difficulty is if a written language is used without attentiveness to its spiritual qualities, it literally cuts off and makes an abstract space instead of a holy space. And an abstract space has no air from nature. An abstract space considers ritual to be the beginning, that everything begins with what we do and how we do it. Therefore, anyone who controls what we do and how we do it has power and authority. And so an abstract space is the dead space, breeding ground for power and authority that is neither natural nor visionary. Let's take a break. Let's come back immediately. We're looking at shared presence. We're looking into the field of vision. And that field of vision is an infinite dimension. It has a deep harmonic with the field of nature, which is a zero field, so that the relationship of. A zero field and an infinite field is a harmonic. This is a mystery. The mystery is disclosable because we can have our experience rise off the plane of the integral into a hyper space of the differential. That's what an ascent is. The takeoff for that ascent is that the seal of natural forms becomes transparent. So that the symbols which seal the natural cycle become transparent, so that transparent symbols are the beginnings of a higher dimensionality. The only way to read written language is to have access to the transparency of symbols as a function of your person. We say then of that person that they are literate in the sense that they can read and write, can lift the printed words off the page into an oral poetry. Let's come back to my own poem, the Sundance Poem from 1981. The central way in which the transparency is shown in a secret way is through the 100 Willow Sweat Lodge. The public way in which this is disclosed is the Sundance Lodge with a pole. The Sundance Pole in the center of it, with the ridge lines going down to a wattled evergreen circle, and that any prayers and all prayers that are offered are written with ribbons and icons, and placed on long poles that collect at the top of the forked Sundance pole. So the sweat lodge is the secret quiet way. Like our presentations here, or like a sweat lodge, the public Sundance Lodge will be when it's released planet wide on the internet. But there is a resolving third, and that is the hut of the wise woman who guarantees through her continuity that that holy space will be there through the membrane of the transparency of the symbols. She guarantees it because her continuity is the quintessence of wisdom. Is a feminine presencing, as in a natural birth. The spiritual rebirth is through the womb of the holy space, which she guarantees, because the profane will be sealed out. But there will be a transparency through which the Holy may, um, have their osmosis into the sacred space. The space within space. And that space within space has its own ecology of consciousness. Which yields to a distillation that goes into a hyperspace. In the next series, we'll talk about that. Here's the second of eight poems that make up the set. The suite of my econ 100 Willow Sweat lodge, each shaft slender, stripped clean, with each bent halfway together. Only the Earth's horizon, like an unmoving bowstring, held their tension full. 100 willows halfway bent and flung with skins airtight over a fresh dug pit stuffed with rocks hot and ready for the cool complimentary water drip and sweet grass strands to purify by steam. The hot and cold brought to focus in sacred privacy centered by summer Earth's bloom. The gentler sizzle behind the more insistent, ladled one such sweet grass strains. The closing of the flap of tan skins together. The dip and drip of mountain stream by bucket, the pinched herbs sprinkled prime and primeval together and quiet drop by beaded drop. So sweet freshness. When the hundred willow sweat lodge is finished. It is largely the men who go into that sweat lodge to purify themselves. But to guarantee that that sweat lodge has a holy space within it, it must share presence with the Holy Woman's Lodge, her place where she has maintained herself since the winter. In continuity. While she guarantees that space and the men purify themselves, two different strands are happening at the same time. It's the essence of Paleolithic wisdom. The men must hunt with courage and skill and determination, but not as killers, as providers. The women must guarantee them, by the continuity of their commitment to life and to the life of the entire people. Not just the tribe, but the people. All Paleolithic peoples names for themselves are the people. So that life is guaranteed, so that love is real, so that families are able to not only function, but to function on many different levels. There can be many kinds of families, including spirit families, where people are related across centuries or millennia and find kindred and realize they belong to very large families, which now, in our time we're beginning to realize are on the interstellar frontier. We have many star systems who have spirit persons who we will find we are related to in very large spirit families in tribes that spanned whole arms of galaxies. She is presented with the tongues of the buffalo. That Tatanka is the Algonquin name for buffalo, and the buffalo tongues are dried and are presented to her so that she will cut them up quietly, patiently, in a holy way. And those buffalo tongues will be distributed as if it were a communion to all of the people of the tribe. If the men are successful at showing their courage without being killers, able to endure even suffering, without anger or retribution when the men have purified themselves. Only men who have fought in battles, have fought in wars, gathered together and have a long buckboard and have their horses, and they go in search of the sun pole, which they will find in the forests nearby. And they will, having selected one, sit around and tell the stories of their bravery, of their courage under fire of the sharing of this among the men. And then they will converge upon the tree to cut it down, and to fashion the big fork at the top, and to load it onto the buckboard, and come back to where the Sundance folks Grounds are singing together, that they are coming in a triumph for life and not a triumph for violence, not a triumph of war, but a triumph of life. Continuousness, which is peace itself. They must raise the sun. Dance pole. Without stopping. Without dropping it. And it takes all of the men together then to be able to do this. Because it's quite a task. Usually the pole is a 30 some feet tall, 20 30ft tall, and quite a large trunk once it's raised Immediately all who have prayers to offer rush in to make sure that they get collected in the fork of the pole. And then the rest of the lodge is built around weaving together the evergreens with the willow bent around it. And this is exactly the kind of shape that the first Grail Lodge ever had when it was built in the West of England, 2000, almost 2000 years ago. They used at that time the trees and the West of Britain. This is a Somerset not far from the Bristol Channel. They used wattle and the bending of the wattle creates a architectural structure, very much like the bending of willows can create an architectural structure that can hold. We'll come back to the Grail and we'll come back to that structure in a little while. Once the Sundance Lodge is finished, once the men have brought that together, the holy women will have chosen one young man out of the men to be the source of the courage for the efficacy of the Holy Space ceremony. They will take two ends of deer antlers that have a perforation at the base, and they will take those antler horns and skewer the young man in his shoulders, and the rawhide thongs will lead from those skewered antler shoulders up to the top of the Sundance pole. The young man will have to pull free from that Sundance pull. And the only thing he can do. They will give him an eagle bone whistle in his mouth, and the only thing he can do is let his heavy breathing make that shrill eagles call through the whistle. He may not cry out. He may not spit out the whistle. He may not stop until he has finished. And by his courage, the holy woman. Then when he finally does pull free will, make sure that all of the dried buffalo tongues are given as a communion of the people that those dried buffalo tongues are transparent symbols, leading the buffalo to be able to understand the holy language of men, and to understand that they are providing life in a cycle, and that they are not killed in violence. They are not killed in anger. They are a part of the ecology of life and they are respected by that. Um. My spirit. Uh uh, grandfather Tatanga Mani, walking buffalo I've talked about before, lived to be 97. And, um, he was the last to have a sacred buffalo skull with the horns still attached, and. It was protected from being put into a museum by my spirit, mother and I, of making sure that it was buried so that it would not be desacralized. If you ever see a film called Saskatchewan with Alan Ladd, there is a portion of my spirit grandfather walking buffalo on a horse with his headdress, and you can see the massiveness of spiritual, mature man. He was the only North American Indian to attend the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893. He represented all of the native peoples of North America. By the way, was adopted by a Scotsman named McLean. His parents had died and so he was raised literally by George McLean, but everyone always called him Tatanka mani in Algonquin walking Buffalo. When the men have proven that they can hunt without being killers, can move to supply the food without violence. A society called the Horns Society is made up of men who could easily be killers, but who display their resonance virility. Together, the Horns Society in Algonquin as its name. They do a ensemble dance by fours. Each set of four men will go through the dance motions together four times, and then the women's society will come out and in fours, do a complementary series of movements to the Horn Society that they accept that these men have that masculine power which they could kill, they could be angry and destroy life, but that they forego that in order to have a shared presence, life together, and that the children are safe, the animals are safe. The land is safe because the men and women share presence together. This is from section five of my poem. Everyone fears the Horned Society, their vigor confirmed in threes. His is Grandfather Spirit's own and each. Along gaited crook they staff like hold confirms in spiral twine powers within power spun young man old chief met talking harsh. The Old Dogs Society welcomes a member new with headdresses of dozens of feathers arranged by threes and sixes. Some fours and such, said hushed. The men's societies in threes prepares to move to dance and celebration of the sun, the horns, the old dogs and then the prairie chickens to. The horned Horn Society is for the vigor of the young masculinity at the peak of its power. The Old Dogs is that the masculinity is coming to the close of its life. The prairie chickens are like the trickster aspect of the masculine, and they dance with feather bonnets on their rumps, and they make these prairie chicken type movements that are actually quite humorous. The sun's need is not its own. It's shining. Pure depends upon nothing. But our response is all. And all of it rotates in time and radiates in space based upon the place we keep within for constancy. Thus this sacrifice with the pop and play of costumed circumstance, a certain stance we share through all time and every space. Deep stillness. That moment within moment builds to presence itself. And so the essence of sky and his essential loveliness. The measured full movement wrapping each direction before shining fullness stilled the summer solstice. For the last 2000 years, the communion. The sharing of the presence of the Last Supper has been one of the great synthesizing ceremonies of this civilization, whose time form ended in 1991, and because of a new time form, everything had to be recalibrated. We had to set our time for new time just as near the end of the time. Form of Abraham and Zarathustra came to an end with the birth of Jesus and of Mary Magdalene. There was a movement to recalibrate where the whole calendar that had been adopted worldwide. The Roman calendar was changed by Julius Caesar, but not by Julius Caesar. By Julius Caesar's command, because he was the dictator of the Roman Empire. But the person behind it was Cleopatra. She understood that time has forms, and when a time form is over, there is nothing that one can do because it is over. Time itself has changed and because it has changed. The whole under structure of space has changed. Because space blossoms out of time. The new time must be consecrated to be able to have a transparent openness to it, so that there can be a holy space within it. Otherwise, if it is mishandled, you only get an abstract new space which presages death, not life. It was then be on a slide like a landslide into death. Universal death. That universal life is available is only because a presencing holy space can be made creatively, and then shared in terms of the prismatic capabilities of spirit persons. The cup that was used at the Last Supper was a cup that belonged to a family. The wife of the family was the second of four sisters of Jesus. Her name was Mary. Like her mother, she had an older sister named Salome and she had two younger sisters named Johanna and Susanna. All four of them were married to very famous men at the time. Salome was married to Zebedee, whose father's name was Zebedee, and Zebedee's brother was called Alphaeus, and Alphaeus was the father of two of the apostles. He was the father of Matthew. Matthew's real name was Levi. Levi bar Zebedee, just as Zebedee's name was Zebedee, bar Zebedee and the other apostle James the Less. They usually call him not a Saint James, Saint James was the brother of Saint John, and they were sons of Zebedee. So four of the apostles were cousins. John and James, Matthew and the other James. And in fact the husband of Mary was named Cleophus, and his family were in international trading because his brother Barnabas Bar, son of Nabas Barnabas, had a huge shipping concern on Cyprus and was able to charter ships doing trade in the Eastern Mediterranean. Cleophus and Mary had one son and his name was John Mark. He became the Apostle, uh, Saint Mark, and Saint Mark was a cousin of John and James, and Matthew and James the less, so that most of the New Testament in its depth and origins, are by family nephews of Jesus after the crucifixion and resurrection, which was at Passover time, and the original Passover was actually made by Joshua upon entering into the Promised Land at the close of the Exodus. Only two men survived the exodus from its initial opening, and one of them was Joshua. Joshua, whose father's name was none so literally his name was Joshua, bar none. It's an interesting thing. And Joshua learned to be a warrior general without being a killer, without being a violent man. And so the ritual celebration of Passover was made to consecrate the entering of the Promised Land through the Jordan River, just as the Exodus had begun of the Exodus taking the Hebrew people led by Moses through the Red sea, Joshua led the people back to the Promised Land over dry land, because the Jordan River was stopped up and they were able to collect 12 stones from the riverbed of the dry Jordan as they crossed over, and those 12 stones were arranged in a sun circle on a ridge outside of Jericho, several miles. And the first Passover was held there in that way, and sun circles made out of stones goes back into ancient Paleolithic times. The most famous in the world, of course, is Stonehenge. But Stonehenge is a much more complicated because it not only has the sun stones, it has the moon stones, which are 56 surrounding it so that you have a very complex work. After the crucifixion and resurrection. There was a scariness of those in power and authority, and all of the family were endangered. And so 12 of the family, uh, members were sent to the west of Britain. And 12 family members and close related kin were sent to Ephesus, and the rest of the apostles were spread around the world. Thomas went to India. Andrew went to a Greece. Matthew went down to Ethiopia, etc.. Thaddeus went to Armenia and so forth, leaving James and Peter um. In Jerusalem, um, to maintain something very important there, not only a presence in Jerusalem, but because Mark Saint Mark was only nine years old at the time of the Last Supper, at the time of the crucifixion and resurrection, and so he had to be tutored for four years before he could have his bar mitzvah. And the tutor for him was Saint James. Saint John's older brother. The 12 who went to the west of England were the four sisters, and therefore husbands Lazarus and his sister Martha, who were the brother and sister of Mary Magdalene, and Nicodemus, who had helped Joseph of Arimathea take the body of Jesus down at great peril to himself, he and his wife, and it made 12 who then went to the west of what was still Britain. Then it was not England and that particular aspect united a diamond shape that was centered on the Irish Sea. At the top of the diamond was Scotland. To the west. On the middle of the diamond was Ireland, to the east was Wales, and to the south was ancient Britain of Cornwall and Somerset, so that you had a diamond of vision of these four ancient kingdoms, and the centre of that diamond became the holy island of Iona, which is one of the most mysterious places on the earth because of its energy. The bottom of the diamond is where Glastonbury is today, and at Glastonbury, those first 12 family members built a circle of meditation cottages for themselves to maintain the holy shared presence. And in the middle of those 12 they made a wattled church, and it became the basis. It was always called an ancient tradition. The old church. The old church was a millennium later made the central symbol in a much larger church, so large that the nave and the transept. Were able to enclose the original old church and meditative spaces, as if it. Were like a sacred altar within the larger church. We see the same phenomenon in Assisi. The original church that Saint Francis built for his shared presence of tuned pair Saint Clair is still there, but it's in the middle of a very large church of Assisi built around it. On top of it all, really ancient sites maintain the pivot of the presence and usually are resonant ripples from the original, the center of the old church of that waddled structure was the cup from the Last Supper, and the plate of the unleavened bread from the Last Supper. And you can see these symbols still in the tarot deck, the cups and they disc with the star is the platter. And of course, then there is the, uh, clubs, the staffs, the staves. The staves are not really clubs. They became the suit of clubs and playing cards, but the staves were like the croziers of the horned society, like the crushers that are held by the cardinals and the Pope. It is a sign of being able to have a controlled life, where it seems to outsiders that one is wandering, but one is actually free because one lives mobily within sacred space that one carries with oneself. Uh, once, uh, some English reporter asked Mahatma Gandhi why, if he was so concerned with, uh, being holy, didn't he go to the Himalayas like a good Rishi and just meditate in a cave? And Gandhi smiled at him. He said, I carry my cave with me every day. Little brown men sometimes have more courage than whole empires. The cup from the Last Supper was silver. It was unadorned silver that was a very thick roll, and it was rounded into a cup that fit inside of later on a surrounding fretwork. The cup. The original cup had its silver lip just bent over the top so that you would have a smooth, uh uh, place for for drinking, but also for serving. And the size of the cup is enough to hold the wine for 12 and a 13th at a meal. Uh, usually an ancient, uh, wine was served. There were no liquors or or whiskeys at the time. There were ancient beer from Egypt, but wine was of usually a pretty strong drink at the time. The server of the wine was the nine year old Mark John Mark, who became Saint Mark because the house that was held in was a very large house owned by Cleophus and Mary, and the upper room was large enough to hold the Last Supper, the 13 together, plus some of the servers who would bring the bread and the wine. But the wine was brought by Saint Mark. So when that holy family went to what became Glastonbury, they took the cup from the Last Supper with them, and that became the Grail. It became the focus of the Holy Presence continued unbroken by not only Jesus himself, but by Mary Magdalene, who was not physically at the Last Supper, but whose shared presence with Jesus, like the Holy woman. And the Sundance, guaranteed that his presence was tunable for others. She was the guarantor that the transparency of his presence was accessible to anyone who could enter into the sacred space, and that by entering into the sacred space together, it was unlimited in terms of time, unlimited in terms of space. So that space time in the universe literally is outdistanced by many dimensions beyond it. Not only does the Lord's house have many mansions, but many dimensions of mansions. As we are coming very rapidly now to be able to appreciate. There are literally star systems without end, with sacred spaces all shareable for us. More next week.