Jesus in Alexandria

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.