Jesus in Alexandria
Presented on: Thursday, September 8, 1994
Presented by: Roger Weir
This event is a commemoration. My daughter
was killed a year ago on this day.
And so I would like to invite her spirit to
come and be here. The living are able to do
this. We can extend an invitation to those
past and bring them present with ourselves.
We have this capacity. And since it is a
commemoration for the beyond to join us,
I would like to extend to you the invitation.
If there is someone that you would like to be
here with us, to just mentally bring them for
us and they can join us.
I would like to thank the owners of the Bodhi
Tree, Stan and Fran and Phil and Elsa, who
have been friends for about 20 years for
their cordiality in making the Bodhi Tree
available for in particular, for this event.
This will be a series of four talks casual,
informal, and these four talks constitute a
review of about 30 years work.
I had not intended on making this kind of
public review, but the conditions of life, as
all of us I'm sure understand, sometimes
force us into other configurations.
And so I do this in commemoration for my
daughter, and thank you all for coming and
being here. This series is about four books,
and these four books are in a
sequence in a series, and they were not
written in the sequence or the series in
which I will discuss them or present them.
But they are the culmination of a gestalt
which has emerged about 30 years ago.
The only thing I was really interested in was
space travel. I wanted to be up with the
UFO's and other planets.
And it seemed to me that there was a
particular gap or lack in our
capacity to do this.
And as I became more and more acquainted with
what there is to know, what there is to look
at, I found that there were four areas that
had not been fully
investigated and discussed, although there
were libraries of books about them and
ongoing populations of seekers concerned with
them. But the four areas were, first of all,
that that our deepest interior quality.
Our soul, our deep self.
However, wish you to call it that there was a
disease, not an illness so much.
But and this ease.
Which that now allows for an easy stability
of center. That the vicissitudes of life very
often buffeted us in ways which we would not
choose to follow.
We would consciously resist. And a lot of
this was due to the fact that our deepest
center, our deepest pivot of self is
unsettled.
Which seemed very curious because after
several billion years of evolution, one would
think that the most indispensable quality of
a life form, its centered presence of
existence, would in the highest form of
development.
Man, as far as we know.
What have long ago achieved that stability?
Why was it not there?
And in investigating this, I found, like most
of you have found, that this has been a
central concern for man for quite some time.
In fact, all of recorded history seems to
indicate that this has been a problem for men
and women. And when recorded history, when
written language first comes into play about
5000 years ago. 6000 years ago at the very
most. We find that that threshold.
There are wisdom traditions that are ancient
at that time. And in those wisdom traditions,
we are always given to understand.
That in more archaic times, men and women
were centered. They did not have the problem
that we have. They did not have the anxiety
or the neuroses.
And the conclusion come to as early as about
4000, 5000 years
ago was that somehow our dis ease of soul are
off center deep self pivot.
Is co extensive with the development of
civilization. That how somehow civilization
is an attempt at reaching out to try to make
an adjunct balance which will help us to
center ourselves. And so the decease of the
soul.
And the development of civilization somehow
are concomitant. They go together. That self
and civilization constitute.
Something. Which has developed in a tandem
relationship.
In a paired relationship.
So the very first thing that occurred to me
about 30 years ago was to try to, at least at
a superficial level, just simply review what
have people said about Sentry, about the
cell? Because we surely are not going to be
able to go out into space without having
settled that issue more or less. And it might
turn out to be.
That extending civilization out to other
planets, to other star systems would be some
kind of furthering of that tandem
relationship to the soul. And it might be
that the stability of our soul has something
to do with space travel. This seemed all
right to me. It seemed okay. But the issue
was still to take a look at what was the.
Major point or if there were several.
What were the main ideas about this disease
of our cell, and what bearing did it have vis
a vis civilization? The second issue that
came up and you might call the first issue
the archetypal issue. What's wrong with our
archetype of the self? The second issue was
one of vision, one of having the ability, the
capacity to see and gestalt
large enough that one could plan. That
somehow this was really important. If we were
to even just conduct ourselves in our own
lives here, much less in complicated
relationships with many other people, with
lives that were taking in other planets and
perhaps other star systems. One would have to
have the vision, the ability to envision
large enough to be able to see what we would
call what the British used to call the big
picture. And so I became curious at the same
time, not only with the archetypal issue of
soul centering or self centering, but the
corollary issue of vision.
How does one get a vision? How does one have
a vision? Not only where does this come from
or what it is, but to actually do it, to
achieve it.
Someone. The third issue concern history,
evidently, from what I could tell 30 years
ago. History is some kind of an evolving
evolutionary level in
itself that we have slowly progressed, not in
all centuries, not in all ages.
But when one looked at a long enough duration
of time, there was progress.
Perhaps not the 19th century idea of progress
as a built in quality, but at least there was
development. And so the issue was that how
can one look at history?
And that was the third. Point.
The archetypal point. The visionary point.
History as a problem, as an issue.
And the fourth then was the application. How
do we actually do this? How do we put it into
practice? How do we bring these reserves and
these qualities into play so that we can
actually affect what we would like to do if
we find ourselves centered?
If we find ourselves with vision. If we find
ourselves understanding history. How do we
bring these into play so that we can go be
free to go?
And so these four lectures will concern
themselves with the three questions, the
question of sole center, the question of
vision, the question of history.
And finally, the fourth one will be how do we
actually utilize these utilize the facilities
which are somehow there, and how will we
actually go?
Tonight. The first one is about the sole
center. Now, like most of you, I was raised
with a more or less cognizant view that there
was religion.
There were churches and synagogues, temples,
places of worship. But like most of you,
I'm sure there were always questions.
Well, where do these come from? How do these
really work? And there were always depths of
understanding that seemed to be beyond any of
the adults that one could ask when one was
young. And when you were old enough to see
for yourself, you could see below and around
and through some of the facade, and realized
that very few people actually understood what
the whole show was about. What are the
central issues concerned?
The person of Jesus and.
It seemed that this figure, this person, if
there was a person or this figure, if there
was only some kind of a figure in the mind or
some traditional image, some perhaps
archetypal symbol, whatever it was, this
particular person seemed to be the most
problematic. There seemed to be no doubt
whatsoever that Muhammad was a historical
figure and one could work his place into
history and into Islamic vision and into the
archetype which Islam itself works upon.
And it seemed also that the historical Buddha
likewise in a little bit more difficult
fashion, but nevertheless the Buddha seemed
to also be someone that you could bring into
those three issues.
But Jesus on every score was a problem.
Was he some one?
Or was he some say?
Or was he just a symbol? And it seemed that a
lot of the difficulty over the last 2000
years, especially with Western Greco-Roman
based civilization, with Roman derived
history, that the question of Jesus was one
that needed to be looked at with a fine tooth
comb. And so I began, I think, about 12, 13
years ago for the first time.
In my life to seriously look at Jesus as a
figure and try to see was there a historical
person or was this just some kind of
theological symbolism? At that particular
time, I was very close friends with the late
Richard Bock, not the author of Jonathan
Livingston Seagull, but Richard Bach with
Janet Bach, who wrote the book on Jesus Lost
Years in India. And it seemed to me that that
was as good a thesis as any that I had run
across at that time. And knowing that the
Bach's had gone to India and researched this,
it seemed to me quite probable, if not indeed
the fact that Jesus had grown up, at least
for some part of his life in India. And it
was it wasn't until several years later that
I found that this was just simply not the
case. Not only was it not the case, it
couldn't be the case. I won't go into all of
the details of that particular
disillusionment. But I was left like anyone
would be simply back at square one.
And so I picked up the New Testament in an
odd kind of a way and just tried to read it
existentially, flat out as it was.
What are the words there? I use the King
James translation because it seemed to me it
was as good as any other translation. Later
on, I would learn to compare various
translations and come to a more sophisticated
gestalt of what I was reading. And as time
went on, I would discover that biblical
scholarship was a burgeoning field for the
last century, and that there were enormous
esoteric viewpoints about every aspect of the
New Testament, such that it became such a
scintillating jewel of problematical unknown.
That just recently in Northern California, a
group of about 90 to 100 biblical scholars
from all over the world held what were called
the Jesus Seminars. And they exed out
somewhere above 80% of the words ascribed to
Jesus as having been editorial interpreting
and interpolated, and that we were left with
just a scant few phrases which could be
ascribed to someone, and they weren't sure
just who it might be. And so in place of a
person, they put a lost manuscript called Q
designated Q from the German word Quellen,
which means a source. And this was the
missing source of the New Testament gospels.
It still hasn't come, I think, through that,
where did you come from?
It must have come from someone, perhaps.
Jesus.
At any rate, in reading the King James Bible
assiduously about nine years ago, I came
across a word.
It was a word that Jesus used when he had
brought two of the men who were to be his
disciples, James and John, sons of Zebedee.
When he had brought them into his fold, had
made them, for all intents and purposes,
disciples. He said, I will call you.
And then the word that's translated in the
King James version is Sons of Thunder. I will
call you Sons of Thunder. But when I looked
up the Greek word to see Sons of Thunder.
Why would he call them Sons of Thunder? What
was the word that the Greek word had nothing
to do with thunder at all? The Greek word was
boanegeres. And when I went to my Liddell
Scott Jones Greek lexicon, about 2000 pages.
And after about an hour of looking through
and trying to find where this word would be
in a very small notation, I found it under
literary criticism on Homer, and that it was
a very rare literary criticism word that was
only used in a very high level refined estete
Homeric scholarship in Alexandria. And so the
original thought occurred to me,
why would reputedly Jesus talking to peasant
fishermen, use an esoteric
literary criticism refined word from Homeric
scholarship that was only used in the
academic center in Alexandria.
And of course, within an hour, the thought
occurred to me, Did Jesus have anything to do
with Alexandria? Had he ever been to
Alexandria? And as the thought occurred to
me. I remembered that there had been a
Christian community in Egypt since the
beginning. Coptic Christians had always been
there and there were 4 million Copts alive in
our own day. And so I got literature.
It took quite a while to bring some of the
Coptic literature together. But I found that
in Coptic Christianity every year there is a
tour of all of the sites where Mary and
Joseph and Jesus, the baby Jesus, had stayed
during their sojourn in Egypt.
And according to the Coptic Church, they had
been there for several years, three or four
years. I found out later that they had been
there for five years. And that the so-called
holy family.
That is to say Jesus within a few weeks of
his birth, up until the age of five, spent
all of that time in Egypt, not in one
particular place, but in being moved from
place to place because there were Jewish
communities almost from time immemorial in
Egypt. Abraham dates back to 1900 B.C., and
he is the beginning of the Jewish presence in
Egypt. And for all that time, for some 2000
years, there were various incursions of Jews
into Egypt.
There was even a Jewish fighting regiment
that was positioned at Elephantine on the
Nile River, and they were professional
fighters and held in very high regard by the
pharaohs. And of course, we remember now that
Moses was born and raised in Egypt, and there
were many Jews there at the time. And in
fact, they had come there in the time of
great troubles and dropped in Jacob's time.
And that Joseph, the youngest son, the 12th
son of Jacob, had become one of the great
advisers running Egypt at the time, and had
made the Jews at home in Egypt and that Moses
was descended some 400 years later from those
Jews.
And we found also that Jeremiah, during the
exile, when the neo-Babylonians had around
600 B.C., taken many of the cream of the
young Jewish men and women to Persia, to
Iran, to run the neo-Babylonian empire of
Nebuchadnezzar.
Many of the Jews refused to be taken on that
exile and in a kind of preemptory exile of
their own. They took a number of people and
went into Egypt. They literally kidnapped
Jeremiah. And the book of Jeremiah is his
criticism of fleeing from this situation,
which God had brought upon the people, and
that this preemptive exile was indeed a
breaking of the covenant of faith in God.
And Jeremiah, towards the end of his book,
says, We must have a new covenant written on
the hearts and minds of the people, and not
upon exterior, stone or on
parchment. And so it came as no surprise that
the Holy Family is spending a lot of time in
Egypt, some five years had many places that
they could go and be sequestered, be hidden
away. And in fact, the Coptic Church, right
up until this day will take you on a tour of
most of those sites. And so I began to try to
put this material into some kind of an order.
I got a large map of Egypt. My friend Steven
Schwartz was in Alexandria at that time doing
psychic archaeology, and he bribed a few
military individuals and got some very
excellent British war maps of sections of
Egypt. And I was able to pinpoint quite
accurately many places that corresponded
corresponded with the Coptic sites.
And I discovered that as the Holy Family had
gone into Egypt, they had made their way
across the Egyptian delta and a very large
letter, almost a w it has nothing to do with
me. But this large W did not go into
Alexandria but curved back.
When they got to the Coptic branch of the
Nile, went back to what has become today
Cairo. And at that time, there was a Roman
military fortress, roughly where
Cairo would be today, just north of where
ancient Memphis was located.
And the name for that Roman fortress was
Babylon, oddly enough. And I was to find
later that when Saint Peter was writing his
letters in Exile from Babylon,
that that's where he was, that he went to
Egypt. He went there to that area of the
fortress. And.
That the scholarship, which says that Peter
is writing from Rome and using Babylon in a
metaphorical way, was completely erroneous.
Saint Peter was nicknamed The Rock because he
was not somebody who would use metaphor at
all. I think that the term rock gets it
across much better. He was a very plain,
tough, ordinary cookie who would not bend.
Indeed, you could trust that Peter's opinions
would remain the same forever. And of course,
the church built upon that rock has earned
its namesake.
I found that the Holy Family, having spent
five years there, made a very interesting
kind of a chronology. The New Testament is
agreed that it was unsafe for Joseph to
take his family back to Palestine until Herod
had died.
And it was a very easy matter of checking
that Herod had died in four B.C.. And pro
writing this I found Jesus must have been
born about nine B.C.. I won't go into all the
details, but the chronology sifts itself out
very, very nicely.
If he were born in nine B.C., I figured out a
developing scenario where his
crucifixion occurred in 36 B.C.
and he was 44 years old when he was
crucified.
Now, there's a great difference between a
native genius man of 30 being seized for
religious sedition and a mature man in his
mid-forties being seized.
There's an enormous difference between that.
And I found that the Jesus of Alexandria, as
I began to call him, was quite an
extraordinarily mature man. He was not at all
the genius of some mythological dimension,
but was a mature man of considered
experience. And my respect for his brilliance
in strategically understanding
the resonant distance of life and of human
nature prove themselves again and again.
So I began to try to put this in some order,
and it began as the seed of this book, Jesus
and Alexandria, which is here in a
manuscript. It's about 400 page single spaced
manuscript. And I had just finished it last
year exactly at this time when with the death
of my daughter, I set it aside for a full
year and I'll take it up now and it should be
ready to probably publish towards the end of
next year. So this lecture tonight is an
introduction to this book and a kind of a
precis about some of the things that I found
in the investigation. It began to occur to me
then that I knew nothing about ancient
Alexandria, and I wondered why the guidebooks
to modern Alexandria did not have the sites
of antiquity. Most of them indicated sites
from one or 200 years ago.
There were all kinds of 19th century sites in
Alexandria and guidebooks. Did they not care
about ancient history? And then it occurred
to me. Perhaps the Islamic invasions of the
six hundreds A.D.
had completely destroyed the city. And so I
began to investigate that. And I, I read the
books on the Islamic invasions of Egypt, and
I found that they had not indeed destroyed
the city of Alexandria. But what had happened
in ancient times, towards the end of the
three hundreds, towards the end of the fourth
century, there was great tectonic activity
and the ancient city of Alexandria subsided
so that it went under.
And what was classic Alexandria and Jesus's
time is now under 60 feet of water and
sediment out in the harbor of Alexandria, and
that there simply was no geography from
ancient times left except for one little Nob
Hill area that had a pillar.
It's called Pompey's Pillar. And this was the
only indication that there was any kind of
ancient antiquity there in Alexandria. So I
was faced with a very peculiar thing. If I'm
working on a Jesus of Alexandria and the
Alexandria I'm looking for has been
completely effaced from Earth.
It's almost as if.
The disguise of the person of Jesus was
completely sealed by the movement of the
earth, taking away what was Earth's greatest
city at the time. And so I began to read up
on Alexandria, and I came to understand that
it was the most peculiar place on the planet
at the time that Alexandria represented this
broadest vision of civilization.
The cream of the culmination of history at
the time, and the sole pivot of the most
powerful individual of that age.
That Alexander the Great. Having determined.
By various esoteric tests that he indeed was
a God, a God who was sent with one particular
purpose to bring all of the various cultures
of mankind together into a single family,
a single mankind, which he called the
ecumenical. And that the ecumenical we get
our word ecumenical from it, that the
ecumenical was the family of man on the known
world, and that Alexander was positioned
where it was because it was going to be the
center. The city made the universal city for
the one mankind, human society, that there
would be a civilization of the world. And
Alexandria was the capital of that. As I
began to look at Alexander's vision, I began
to realize that he had indeed knit together
Greece and Egypt and Palestine and Persia and
India.
And on the way back from India was ready to
begin two particular military campaigns.
One was to go completely around Africa with
ships, and the other was to send his armies
all the way to Spain and the British Isles
and Ireland and to the regions in the far
north, that he had brought the east, the
eastern half of civilization into a single
kingdom and was now going to spread it to the
west and to the South, and that Alexander was
going to be midway between these three
regions of population.
But he died. He died very young.
And all of his generals decided to divide up
what was to be the academy.
They considered it Alexander's vision, which
only a God man could carry out. And they were
ordinary men.
True, they were generals. And they could run
kingdoms. But they were not divine. They
could not make an ecumenical a mankind.
Except for one general. And his name was
Ptolemy. And he is known to history as
Ptolemy. Ptolemy. Soter, Ptolemy's savior.
And Ptolemy realized that he did
not have to have the talent of Alexander.
That Alexander had given his vision a shape
which was the city of Alexandria. And as long
as he held Alexandria close to Alexander's
vision that the city of Alexandria would
function as if Alexander, in his maturity,
were still alive and still there. And in
order to put an anchor to this to synch this
argument for himself and for those who were
following him, he made sure that when the
great vehicle that was carrying the body of
Alexander, a great, huge car, many wheels and
a huge platform and enormous sculptures on
it, all capped with a solid gold
setting in, which was set a crystal glass
coffin containing the sealed body of
Alexander the Great. Ptolemy saw that this
body was stolen, not left to go back to
Macedonia and taken into Alexandria.
And he put it in the center of the city. They
built a special building called the Sima.
Sima from like Soma.
Sima means body.
The place of the body. And so this mystical
body which had gone beyond life but not into
death but into a transcendental vision, was
put in the very center, like the anchor was
like an archetype so that the city of
Alexandria had this mystical body soul
center. And I found that the body of
Alexander had been respected and left there
for about 300 years.
And in all the vicissitudes of Ptolemaic,
Alexandria, many generations of Ptolemy's,
the body was never disturbed. And when the
last Ptolemy, who was actually a woman,
Cleopatra. The last of the inheritors of the
vision of Alexandria as the center of the
world, the last keeper of the body of
Alexander the Great. When Cleopatra was
killed, the man who had managed to have her
kill herself without him doing it, the wily
genius Augustus who became Augustus Caesar.
Octavian who became Augustus Caesar spent a
night alone in the cinema with the body of
Alexander, and that in his contemplation he
was convinced that he was a reincarnation of
Alexander the Great, meant to bring the
entire world under one aegis, and so was born
the Roman Empire. The idea of the Roman Empire
was that it was the ecumene.
Now one problem presented itself and that
was that the Caesars,
were from Rome, not from Alexandria. In
order to get around this, because Augustus
was very wily, extremely powerful man, very
clever.
He knew how to handle power in a big way. He
was the the originator of the biggest
political machine that the world has ever
seen. The Roman Empire. It's still operates.
He made the province of Egypt, his personal
property.
It was not a province of the Roman Empire
that belonged to the Senate and the Roman
people. It belonged personally to him. And
its capital, Alexandria, was his private
place of esoteric power. Now, this was also fortified
not just with a kind of a magical military vision,
but Egypt at that time. It was like the American
Midwest or the Canadian Midwest. It was the breadbasket,
the place where grain came in oceans.
And so it meant that the food supply of the
Roman Empire, the excess food supply,
belonged personally to whoever was the Roman
emperor.
And Alexandria, with its power control, saw
to the fact that he had the justification for
holding the entire world under his sway. This
so powered all of the Roman emperors after Augustus
that one after another. They either broke themselves
over Alexandrian mysticism, over the vision of Alexandria,
or they became interested in trying to transfer
it to shift that power to the city of Rome
itself, which eventually they were able to
do. After the Caesar's, after that Caesar line, after that
family wore out. The person who started a new imperial
family, the Flavians, the emperor's name was Vespasian.
He got the vision while he was in Alexandria and he heard
stories. This was 69 A.D. He heard stories that the city
itself was the confirmer of messiahs and that one of the
aspects that proved that the city approved of a man being
the Messiah is that he could teach the blind to see.
And of course, those around Vespasian allowed for a man
ostensibly blind to come up begging Vespasian for
restoration of his sight and Vespasian taking
some spittle from his mouth and mixing it
with Alexandrian dust and coating the man's
eyes. The man could see and Vespasian got the
idea that he was the Messiah, the chosen one.
But the competition at that time was not so
much from Rome.
The competition was from Jerusalem because
Jerusalem had all this time been like some
secret tandem pair with Alexandria in the
background. And the competition for Vespasian
was that somehow the Jewish capital of
Jerusalem had to have its power removed so
that he could take his Alexandrian mystical
power and transfer it to Rome. And so it was
Vespasian son, Titus, who laid siege to the
temple in Jerusalem and decimated it so
that its power would be broken in laws. It
was then that Vespasian transferred the power
of Alexandria to Rome in 78.
And in the center of the Roman Forum, as one
came up the sacred way into the power
buildings of the burgeoning Roman Empire.
There was an enormous triumphal arch made.
It's called the arch of Titus, and it's still
there. And on the very center of the arch of
Titus, in the sculptures of the transference
of all the sacred powers of the world at the
time, is the great huge menorah from the
temple in Jerusalem. And it was it's shown in
Roman hands in the Roman parade and put in
the arch of Titus and the forum in Rome. And
as one goes through the arch of Titus, one
used to in those times come upon the building
that Augustus Caesar had made the Apaches,
Augusta, the building which built like a low
bunker.
It was like a psychic magic Tevatron of the
founding of the Roman Empire.
In the arm torches, Augusta.
All of the sacred energies of antiquity have
been gathered together by Augustus Caesar. In
it, we're put all of the leaves of prophecy,
all of the sibling prophecy, all of the
fragments. It was under penalty of death to
withhold any fragments of the sibling
prophecies and any other prophetic writings.
And that energy was put into the Apache,
Augusta and SEAL.
So that Augustus was confident that he had
cinched a knot where all magical power
whereby the archetypal energies of having a
vision to rule mankind throughout history
were put into place. And with the founding of
the Flavian dynasty, Rome became known as the
Eternal City.
And they had a huge celebration. At the time,
Rome was about 800 years old.
And from this came the idea that now Rome
could extend its rule anywhere in the world
that it wished. And in fact, after the
Flavian dynasty, after a period of
difficulties, the younger son of Vespasian
was named Domitian. And Domitian was a very
cruel figure, and towards the end of his
reign was called The Terror. But after that,
the Roman Empire did indeed extend itself to
almost all of the known world under Trajan
and Hadrian. Rome simply ruled wherever it
was.
There were Roman garrisons in such far flung
places as Vietnam, if you can believe, and
into the city centers of Asia and as far
north as they could go in the British Isles.
The only people to really ever stop them were
the women of Scotland. Oddly enough, Boudicca
and her pagan Scottish Ladies and Warriors
simply defeated the Romans so many times that
the Romans and disgust built a wall called
Hadrian's Wall, putting them outside of
civilization. They're always going to be
savages. Let them be savages. They will never
participate in the many now called the Roman
Empire.
And I found in all of this that hidden away.
Hidden away constantly. Was the figure of
Jesus in terms of his symbolic capacity.
To somehow take the energy from Alexander the
Great to Augustus Caesar and telescope it
into a compact.
Just of brilliance and that it was this
figure, the Imperial Messiah.
Who rules the world was complete power that
became the religion that the Roman
Empire adopted for itself under Constantine.
And Constantine in order to make sure that no
one would ever question this move the center
of imperial power out of Rome to a new city
which he set up Constantinople.
We'll come back after a break. But I would
just like to round it out in this way. In all
of this development, I found that not one
single person looked at the figure of Jesus,
the man. He was always looked at in terms of
archetypal symbolic
power. As a figure who would be a
justification for what men would do, who he
was in actual historical practice.
No one had ever asked. We left off with
something
which historically is about as practical as
you can get. The Roman Empire and the Roman
Empire in terms of keeping track of its
power. I assure you there's nothing more
practical than the Roman Empire keeping track
of its power. And so I took a look at the
material. Not only surrounding Augustus
Caesar and the founding of the Roman Empire.
And around Vespasian. And the moving of the
occult energy from Alexandria to Rome. But I
also looked at Constantine. Who moved that
energy from Rome to Constantinople.
And what was curious is that in the
Constantine case.
He made the Christian religion. The power
base of the Roman Empire.
And in order to do this he did it in typical.
Stiff arm.
Roman Empire style.
He held a conference and invited all of the
bishops.
All of the heads of the various Christian
churches. And told them they could not leave
until they had worked out a set of doctrines
which he could use.
In formulaic way and very simple Roman law
ways as the basis to run the empire.
And so they had a conference and the man in
charge of this conference, his name Eusebius.
And you see, this was. Under the gun.
By concentrating to make sure that this
convention worked. And it did.
And it holds to this day. But you see the US
being very cautious because he was working
for a relentless.
Professional killer course of Jane was not a
nice man. He wrote an account of a
history of the Christian church.
Putting all of the proof's in it so that he
could show that he had done his job right.
And the earliest evidence that he uses comes
from a figure from Alexandria known as Philo.
Follow of Alexandria. Follow today's.
But the curious thing. He doesn't call Fila
Fila judice. He calls him follow of
Alexandria. And he says in his history.
Of the church written in order to prove to
Constantine that he had done this right. He
shows that the characteristic ceremonies and
rituals.
Operative actions that are done by
individuals and communities have been done
all this time since Bi-Lo of Alexandria, and
he uses one of Thilo's books called On the
Contemplative Life to show. Indeed, we know
that this power was there at Alexandria from
Jesus and that it was moved to Rome and that
it was moved now to Constantinople.
That's why the Roman Empire will work. That's
why the Christian church will be eternal and
will work, because the power bases of these
institutions are founded on the fact that the
original power base was in Alexandria from
Jesus.
And the proof of it was followed. Now the
difficulty.
That did not occur at that time because it
was incontestable.
Anyone who looked at the situation could see
that recipients have done this job well. It
wasn't until several centuries later when
there were real problems between Byzantine
Christianity, the Greek Orthodox Church and
Roman Catholicism, and difficulties there
that the Roman Church began to say, Well, no,
the power is not from Alexandria, it's from
us, because we have the original Christian
church.
We had Saint Peter. Who founded the church.
But if one looks at your this. And his name
literally means someone who's very
trustworthy. You see that?
The characteristic descriptions.
Of the powerful actions that are taken. The
contemplative actions of sealing language
within the secret heart.
So that it is a receptive purity to receive
the upper classes of God within the
individual. Which then translates out into
relationality that build the community
into a spiritual resonance population that
all of this is indeed in phyla.
The problem is is that files on the
contemplative life was written about 25 AD.
Long before there was a Christian church.
Saint Peter didn't go to Rome until the late
fifties, aged more than 30 years after Fowler
wrote his book.
More than 25 years before Paul ever went on
any kind of mission whatsoever.
And in fact, the difficulty was compounded if
Philo, a Jew in Alexandria, is writing about
the most distinctive rituals, ceremonies and
practices which are indubitably
distinctive of the Christian church. And more
serious this time, if he is writing these,
then there must have been a community of
people practicing these rituals, ceremonies,
practices in Alexandria that Fila was an
eyewitness to around 25 A.D..
Where did they come from? Who was their
teacher? Who established them? I don't have
time to go into it, but I worked out the ages
of various people, use various techniques. I
found, for instance, that John the beloved
disciple. Was only 11 years old when he met
Jesus. He was only 14, a boy of 14 when the
Last Supper was held.
And no wonder Jesus at 44 and the man who
became Saint John, the boy, 14, wondering
what's going on in his head, on his shoulder.
And of course, in the crucifixion, the older
man assigns the boy.
To. A woman to watch, not his mother.
His mother was in her later sixties at that
time, not capable at all of bringing up a 14
year old but another woman. A woman his own
age, about 44.
Mary Magdalene, who took the young John under
her wing and raised him right.
And when Mary Magdalene moved to Ephesus, she
took the man who would become Saint John with
her. And in fact, we know the only tomb that
we know is the tomb of Mary Magdalene.
We know where it is. It's in a cave not far
from the offices. And that's where Saint John
spent most of this time as a mature man.
In fact, the cave is called the Cave of the
Seven Sleepers. It's the only site that's
sacred to Islam, as well as Christianity in
its eastern form.
As I looked more and more at the characters
in the ages and the probabilities, I began to
ask, How was it that no one saw this?
I must be wrong, right? I'm the only one who
sees this. It's got to be wrong. All right.
Assume that it's wrong. What other ways can
you go?
And I found that the interpretation is frayed
and led to dead ends. So I took the other
tack. Assumed that you're right. Jesus wasn't
Alexandria.
If that's so, how do you read things? And it
turned out that more and more I was able to
read and make sense of what had happened. The
earliest.
Missionary for what became a missionary
religion.
Christianity was Saint Paul, the man of the
King St Paul.
He began about 50, 88, 49, 50 A.D..
And if you look at the letters of Paul and
his epistles.
There is a figure who consistently is on the
same level with him, a figure named Apollos.
Apollos, who is from Alexandria and in
several places.
In Paul's letters, he talks about people
saying that we should not divide ourselves as
saying Some are from Apollo Summer, from
Paul, some are from Jesus. We're all one
family. We're all one man, one community.
So I went to a biblical dictionary. I'd never
heard of a polis. Who was Polis of
Alexandria. And underneath it I found a very
curious little notation.
It referred me to the writings of Martin
Luther, of all people, and that Martin
Luther, being one of the first people, the
Renaissance became the Reformation.
The Renaissance discovered the brilliance of
antiquity. And then the Reformation
discovered that there was a figure that
brought together the brilliance of antiquity
into one person Jesus, the man Jesus.
And so the Reformation grew out of the
Renaissance because it was like a honing in
and saying, Well, the brilliance of antiquity
was all wrapped up in one person. And Martin
Luther was one of the few people in the
Reformation who was able to read the Bible
for himself without any editing because his
friend, the man at these two for a while was
his friend. Erasmus was the first person in
about 1500 years who took the material, the
Greek material, and went over it and made
sure that all of the grammatical mistakes
that have crept in over the centuries were
corrected because New Testament Greek is very
sophisticated, it's very refined.
The Greek that Jesus spoke is extremely
refined. It's not only literate, it's
impeccable. Right?
The upshot is Erasmus made a Bible, a
translation out of the Greek into the Latin
for the first time without any editing by any
committees. And Luther read this and he saw
that one of the letters that had been
ascribed to Paul was in a completely
different Greek.
And it uses the Greek language in a
completely different way. Is not by Paul at
all was saved all this time because everyone
thought because they couldn't read Greek well
enough to tell the difference in voice. They
thought it was one of Paul's letters. It's
called The Letter to Hebrews, the Epistle to
Hebrews. It is a letter about Jesus to Jews,
and it's written in Alexandria. And it's
written in the same kind of Alexandrian Greek
that firewall views. And it's written.
Apollos began to do travels late in his life
when he was old in 58. It's written long
before 5080.
It's written probably in the late thirties.
Ad at the latest and perhaps earlier. It's
entirely consistent with files, writings.
In the letter to the Hebrews, Apollos says,
We know this about the pioneer of our faith
because we have a cloud of witnesses in this
city who knew him, not just a few people, but
the phrase is a cloud of witnesses. This
city.
Knows what's going on because we have a
living tradition from people here who
participated in it, from its foundations. And
so I went from
Epistle to the Hebrews. I went back to
furlough and went back to the contemplative
life. I read it, I thought, What can this be?
And in reading it, it turns out that Philo
had written a second book that went with this
one was called The Active Life, and the other
was called The Contemplative Life. And the
Active Life was about the scenes, and it's a
book by a father which has been lost. File
wrote a book about the active life of the
people from Qumran.
The scenes.
From down around the shore of the Dead Sea.
And as a peer to that, he wrote about the
contemplative days. And he says there are
contemplative communities in several places
of the world, but the father land of them all
is just outside Alexandria and a retreat
which has been there. For many generations
of.
And is located because this was one of the.
Archetypal power spots in the world at the
time. The spot is called Taposiris Taposiris.
In ancient Egyptian religion is the place
where one enters into the Assyrian underworld
in the sense that he is resurrected from that
spot, is brought to life again from that
spot. Taposiris And so the contemplative
community was founded there and as I
investigated. More and more, it seemed to me
there were many writers, especially French
writers, who were saying that a lot of those
writings are neo platonic. But when you went
deeper into ancient philosophy and it took
several years to just even review the basics
of ancient philosophy, I did the lecture
series on every one of Plato's dialogues in
order to get down. Well, what's.
What does Plato say if he said, if Philo is a
neo platonist, let's get down to what Plato
said and take a look. And what came out more
and more is that Philo was not so much a neo
platonist, but he is a neo Pythagorean. And
so the practical question for somebody who
really doesn't know at that point is what's a
Pythagorean? Who are they?
And looking at Pythagoras, it became apparent
that Pythagoras was a staggering individual
who had studied in Egypt for 22 years.
He had studied in Persia for 11 years and had
brought back a synthesis of Egypt and Persia
back to Greece.
And was received very much like a pioneer of
wisdom is always received by nobody. One of
the signs of true wisdom is that there's
nobody there. Initially, you talk to an empty
room. Pythagoras to get his first student
paid a young man three miles each time he
came to have a lesson. And after a couple of
years, he said he couldn't afford to pay the
young man any more. And the young man was
getting so much out of it that he said, well,
I will pay you three minus. And that's how
Pythagoras began to be an effective teacher.
Pythagoras is famous, famous for
understanding that number is the
synthesizing, symbolic core of reality.
Someone at Caltech a couple of years ago
remarked to me, he said, We're all
pythagoreans here. Because mathematics is at
the structural foundation of all
relationality.
That you can deal with clumsy.
One for one correspondent's objectivity just
so far.
But to get something that's really wide
ranging, deep plumbing, you have to go into
mathematical relationality. And one of the
curious things is that the higher the math,
the more broad its effect in actual nature
and actual fact.
E equals C squared makes a hydrogen bomb.
Pythagoras was the first to understand
that at the deepest core of the integrating
mind, there is a mathematical structure that
brings itself to an ultimate threshold, a
threshold beyond which no language can go.
But we can.
It was a secret sacred interior space.
And because it was the final destination of
the Pythagorean. Discipline.
It was also put at the very beginning of the
Pythagorean community. When you came into a
Pythagorean community, you were first
admonished to have silence for five years.
That is to say, whenever there was a
community meeting, whenever there was
operational, getting together, you just
listen for the first five years, learn to
hear before you say anything. And so the
initial stage of the Pythagorean community
were the Kuzma, Tiki, the Kuzma, like
acoustic hearing.
You have to learn to hear. Before you can
speak.
But there's something in between learning to
hear and speaking. What is that? There is a
silent core.
A so called the space of the deep self is an
appreciation of the mathematical distance.
So you learn to listen, then you learn to
see.
And then you can say something worthwhile.
That speaking is only third level.
You have to learn to hear first and the
worldly ear doesn't hear wisdom at all.
When I speak high wisdom and make a cassette
of it, you could take that and play that for
the most intelligent people that you know,
and they wouldn't hear very much at all.
Occasionally somebody will. You can play it
for.
Other people that you know, who are not
particularly intelligent but who have kind of
like a harmfulness, they'll hear more. It
takes a while for the worldly air to
change itself.
It's like losing the taste for too much
sugar, losing the taste for too much salt. It
takes a while to be able to hear something
playing. Just as it is unvarnished.
In the Pythagorean communities. It took five
years. It turned out that the contemplative
community used this kind of technique, but in
an updated fashion.
They came about in Jesus's time, about 500
years after Pythagoras. And in fact, that
figure, that number, 500 years, where had I
heard it before? 500 years.
And then I realized it's about seven or eight
years ago that 500 years was the cycle of the
Phoenix in antiquity. And the resource for
that cycle of the Phoenix was not some far
out or call author, but the most somber
stayed Roman historian of all Tacitus.
It's extremely difficult to read because he's
just brutally frank and practical, and he
clubs his Latin phrases just like a good
Roman engineer should. There's nothing occult
about Tacitus.
He says the cycle of the Phoenix was the
sacred pace of visionary history in
antiquity, and that the home of it was Egypt.
And that the cycle of the Phoenix was 500
years. And it turned out that between
Pythagoras and Jesus was almost exactly 500
years. And when I worked out some of the
correlations, I realized that there were
indeed Pythagorean influences, not only there
in Alexandria, Philo was a Pythagorean
Pythagorean ism, was an Alexandrian
philosophy. Exactly at that time.
But the distinctive thing about the
Pythagorean communities was that when one saw
the mathematical relationality as one got
visionary about the structures, the structure
of time, the structure of human beings, the
structure of language.
One of the characteristic things about
Philo's allegories, interpretation of the
Torah was that he saw that the Torah as a
whole was in the shape of a body, a mystical
body. Some parts were hands.
Some parts were legs. One part was the heart.
One part was the head. One part was the mine.
It's very Pythagorean. To see the Torah as a
mystical body of language which could
somehow be internalized into the soul silence
of oneself and seeing in its cosmic
truth so that one's language could blossom
out of this and be a truthful language, a
symbolic, visionary language. And then it
occurred to me that there was a book at the
very end of what is called colloquially the
Old Testament that has exactly this kind of
language. It was the book of Daniel. One of
the greatest archetypal prophetic books ever
written The Book of Daniel. And indeed in the
Book of Daniel, which is it turns out to be a
workbook for how to interpret dreams and how
to use a dream interpretation so that you can
refine it, so that you can interpret other
people's dreams. And when you get to that
level, how you can then interpret. Once in a
lifetime, world class dreams, death dreams,
visionary dreams, and how from that you can
interpret a vision of history as a whole, as
a unity of time, as a single pattern. And
that the Book of Daniel was in the scene
workbook for this. Written around one 6080,
even though set back
in history at the time of the exile.
But what's interesting is that in the final
apocalypse in Daniel, the seeing of all time
as a pattern vision of a plan of God, there
is a mystical figure who comes through, who
has hair white as snow has burnt jewel like
skin has blazing eyes and voice sounding
like many waters, eyes like lightning. And I
thought, I've seen this figure before, or at
least I've read about this figure before.
Where have I read about it? And a little
searching around found that that figure
reappears in the Book of Revelation. Written
a couple hundred years later. To make a long
story short, I found that there's a magician.
Of the Book of Revelation. There are many
symbolic editions of the Book of Revelation,
and I have about 40 of them in my own
library. But the really ace one is by a
woman. It's the one in the Angkor Bible.
Angkor Bible is about 50 volumes and just
about ready to be finished. Every book of the
Bible with up to date early 21st century
scholarship.
And the woman who wrote the Angkor Bible
commentary on the Book of Revelation says
there's no question whatsoever. But that
revelation was always difficult to interpret
because it's two books telescoped into one.
It's a central book, which is one of the
world's great apocalypses by a torrential,
fiery person surrounded by a very elegant,
highly symbolic, insightful other person that
writes a little bit before and a little bit
after and encloses this fire. And she says
the outer portions are most certainly by the
man known as Saint John, but that the inner
portions are by the man known as John the
Baptist. And John the Baptist uses the very
same visionary figure that the author of the
Book of Daniel used two centuries before. And
there's very good reason for it, because it's
a central, synthesizing, symbolic soul figure
of the same.
And that while John the Baptist was the last
head of the assassin community, the author of
the book of Daniel, who turns out to be the
man known to scholarship now as the Teacher
of Righteousness, was the author of The Book
of Daniel is the first to bring it in, in
between the Book of Daniel and the central
vision of the Book of Revelation. I don't
know whether you know, but Daniel and
Revelation have always been together as an
esoteric puzzle nook.
Sir Isaac Newton, one of the world's great
mathematical genius, has spent the last 30
years of his life trying to figure out what
was the relationship between the figures and
symbols in the Book of Daniel and the figures
and symbols in the Book of Revelation. He
spent 30 years. Because he could see like an
old Pythagorean mathematic and he could
understand subtle gestalt of relationality,
and he saw that the two somehow fit together
and how he never figured it out. But they go
together because they're the parentheses that
encase the scene.
Tradition. And not only did the teacher of
righteousness write the book of Daniel, which
is like a dream workbook, to teach people how
to gain visionary depth and insight. He also
wrote the Book of Joe, which makes him one of
the world's greatest authors, about the
individual out on the last bit of limb from
this world.
And the only key to his sanity is that he
does not disbelieve in God.
Everything else is taken from him. He does
not relinquish that. And because of that,
everything is returned to Joe. Life comes
back again. He is resurrected again. Now we
know from the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are
from the Qumran community, from the Assyrian
movement, that the Thanksgiving Psalms are
all by the teacher of righteousness. We have
about 40 pages of them in translation. You
could get them the penguin edition of the
Dead Sea Scrolls and you can see the
Thanksgiving hymns in their. And you can get
the quality of the writing of the teacher of
righteousness and what is there constantly in
the Thanksgiving hymns and the Book of Jobe
in the Book of Daniel is the call for a
community to purify its spiritual
relationality as.
Because even though no one man can see the
face of God, not even Moses. The community
purified is the right vehicle to see the face
of God.
And if the community is prepared and
purified, God will show His face. Which means
that he'll incarnate as a sizable human
figure known as the son.
There is a peculiar quality that I found and
it's I put it all through Jesus and
Alexandria. I'd like to just give you a
little taste of it by reading a section of it
with your permission. This is a section which
takes two figures one Lazarus, the brother of
Mary Magdalene. Incidentally, Mary and
Lazarus and their sister Martha were very
well-to-do. Their father had been very
wealthy in trading, and whole communities
just outside of Jerusalem belonged to them.
So I have put together a file of Alexandria
and Lazarus in Alexandria, and they're on
their way out to the community, not the
Essien community by the Dead Sea, the act of
life, but the contemplative life just outside
of Alexandria, about a day's walk about 2
hours by horse, a site which I think I've
located quite accurately on the British
military maps from the Second World War. One
could mount an expedition. One could take the
National Geographic Society to the place. Not
that there's anything there much because
everything was moved, everything was taken
out because one of the distinctive things
about Jesus turns out to be He understands
that wisdom cannot be sequestered away from
man forever, that there comes a point where
it has to be returned back to the community,
that life must be nourished by the highest
wisdom. It is not to be used for individuals
to exit this world in some moksha of their
own.
Some permanent vacation and nirvana on their
own. And I'm giving you a preview now about
what next week's lecture is on the about.
That in fact, Mahayana Buddhism.
She is influenced very deeply by esoteric
Hellenistic Judaism as presented by Jesus.
We'll get to that next week. Here is a little
section from Jesus in Alexandria, Lazarus and
Philo in the Sarah Palin, the patron God of
Alexandria.
In the temple. The Sarah Palin. And it's a
place where people come to be healed. And of
course, the people coming to be healed are
very sick. And so it's not a very nice place.
It's kind of like a living mausoleum. It was
an impasse starkly present in the
gloom of the Alexandrian serpent. Lazarus
felt the blocking tenor of the resistance.
Philo thought about the implications. Both
men whispered in the incense haze about the
impossibility of tapping death's darkness for
the hidden sources of life's light. They
hushed the word ambivalent several times to
each other, and the phrase entombed, hark!
Snake like and wing it. Things threaten the
imagination of he who would challenge such
limits. There was no shelter in the ecology
of the human imagination. When those demons
are those. Hidden at the labyrinthine center
of one such ecology of the imagination was
the mythology of ancient Minoan Crete. The
miniature half man, half bull. Theseus had
managed to get to that central challenge by
his own courage, but to return back out
again, back to the living beyond the
labyrinth, he needed the help of a woman
companion, Ariadne.
She held the spindle from which Theseus
unwound the thin cord called in Greek, the
clue while he went in, and only by trusting
her to hold her in, could he rewind the cord,
call clue in Greek and come back into life.
She was the companion of the Resurrection
mythology. Five, says Mary Magdalene.
Did your. Did your sister ever write about
Jesus personally? I mean, did she ever write
as to their personal relationship? Well, what
brings her to your mind, Frank? Well, all
this hope for healing in a world of the
dying. And the hopes pinned onto mythological
figures to take us through when all they can
do is take us around again. The mythology is
like the wheel of excision to the spiritual
person. They need to be conscious in life,
not run around in story figures.
Only by transforming myth into symbol can the
very idea of salvation or enlightenment be
recognized. Jesus could so easily be taken in
mythological terms.
I just doubt our discussion realized the
potential danger he could be subsumed into
myth and safely stored in tradition. Another
figure for culture without any but no
transformation, no alchemy, no consciousness.
Radiant from an inner, no point dimension.
Well, this is a challenging set of ideas, but
what made you mention my sister Mary? Well,
is she perhaps the guarantee that he will not
be mythologized? I have never really thought
of this. Is she further the companion for him
in some future emergence from death? And it
goes on in that light. Of the peculiar
aspects.
And perhaps the unknown hero.
And the whole of Jesus.
And Alexandria's Mary Magdalene. The most
misplaced figure in history other than Jesus
himself. It's curious, but the old Saint
John, when he was remembering
the events of the resurrection, remembered
quite accurately that it was Mary Magdalene
who went to the tomb on the third day,
because it was traditional then to make sure
that certain things were done vis a vis the
body. It was he who remembered because.
She had come back.
Saying that the door of the tomb, which was a
huge stone, had been moved and perhaps
thieves had taken the body. This was a body
that could be sold for quite a lot of money
and a would be messiah. And he himself was an
eyewitness as a 14 year old boy.
Running back with her. And because he was
young, he was faster, and he ran ahead of her
and went into the tomb and he could see that
the body was gone.
And so he went out to tell the older men, the
other disciples, that the body was gone. It's
been taken. And that Mary Magdalene a second
time came, but this time she went into the
tomb. Except that she could see she was a
mathematician. She could see. The forms that
were there that the world, the eye could not
pick up. And when she came out
of the chair, she got the idea that what she
had seen there was a space, not a body gone,
but a space.
And she saw a figure. She thought it was the
gardener. And she was beginning to weep, the
tears coming in her worldly eyes. And she
said, They've taken the body of our rabbi.
We don't know where he's been laid. And the
figure she'd mistaken from the Gardner cult.
Her name? And then she saw she didn't see
with her eyes.
They were still smeared with tears, but she
saw in the train space of her mind, her
mathematic. Now, how do we know that since
this kind of romantic fiction.
Occult Dynasty screenplay stuff.
We know this because there is a book from the
early second century, which it was written
down about 130 ad in Alexandria, because at
that time there was a great preacher named
Valentinus who was bringing out an odd
version of events that became a kind of
Valentinian Gnosticism. And so the technique
was written down.
In a book called Pistol Sophia. And though it
was written down in about 130 a day, it was
about 100 years old at the time in terms of
an unwritten tradition. And its hero was Mary
Magdalene. And the Vista.
Sophia is all about the technique that
matches up with the contemplative life, the
therapeutic, the healer community just
outside of Alexandria. That certain riddles,
certain spiritual phrases of language are
given as a problem.
And they're like a chance to practice one's
inner, contemplative resolving meditation so
that you see in your mind the resolution to
the riddle of the words.
And time and time again, the Vista Sofia
shows how that methodology works. And is Mary
Magdalene who becomes the first teacher of
those. Jesus teaches her how to do this, and
then she is the teacher to the world of this.
She's the one she teaches
how the mathematical practice the
neoclassical Alexandrian Jesus Healer
community took mind power.
And resolved world labyrinths.
In such a way that one could then speak in a
language which carried that centered presence
and resolved by the word.
The operative figure was even called the word
because of this practice.
Peter and the other men did not like this.
They didn't like her. In the Gospel of
Philip, one of the lost gospels that was
found. Peter says to Jesus in one part, Why
are you always being so close to her? Why are
you kissing her on the lips all the time? And
Jesus says to him, If you don't know, you
better think about it again. You better
internalize. What this relationality of
healing is.
It has something to do with love. It doesn't
have anything to do with rocks.
It has something to do with relationality and
love. Because as long as you're building with
building blocks in 1 to 1 correspondences,
the most you can do is make Roman roads over
other people's territory. There's no way that
you can build a community polished enough so
that the face of God can be seen. Until you
bring in that mathematical relationality,
that's only possible through the ratios of
love between people. And before the love
is able to be practiced, one has to have the
faith that it's going to be there. And that's
what Pista is. Pistol Sophia the faith.
That wisdom works when you learn how to do
it. But that you can't do it.
Queuing up to road builders. More next week
because the story is.