Essenes (Part 1)
Presented on: Tuesday, May 7, 1985
Presented by: Roger Weir
Ancient Rome: Rome, Essenes, Alexandria, and the Book of Enoch
Presentation 21 of 54
Essenes (Part 1)
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, May 7, 1985
Transcript:
May the 7th, 1985. This is Roger Weir's lecture on the Essenes, part one.
The Old Testament is a cycle. There are several cycles in the total structure, making them epicycles. And at the end of each of the epicycles, there's a great culmination of vision. The most powerful culmination of vision in the Old Testament is in Ezekiel. Ezekiel's vision is a cosmic penetration to form perhaps most memorably encapsulated as wheels within wheels way up in the middle of the air. And so, Ezekiel has towards the end of its structure - and it consists of 48 chapters - in the 47th chapter of Ezekiel is a vision. And it is a vision of the Dead Sea. And Ezekiel writes in this manner.
"And he brought me to the entrance of the house, and behold, water issued from under the porch eastward for the front of the house looked eastward, and the water came down from the right side, from the south to the altar. And he brought me out by the way of the northern gate. And he led me round by the way, outside to the gate of the court that looks eastward. And behold, water came down from the right side in the direction in which a man went forth opposite. And there was a measuring line in his hand, and he measured a thousand cubits with the measure. And he passed through the water, and it was water of a fountain. And again, he measured a thousand, and passed through the water, and the water was up to his thighs. And again, he measured a thousand, and he passed through water up to the loins. And again, he measured a thousand, and he could not pass through, for the water rose as a torrent, which men cannot pass over. And he said to me, thou hast seen this son of man. Then he brought me and led me back to the brink of the river." This is the Jordan River.
"As I returned, and behold, on the brink of the river, there were very many trees on this side and on that side. And he said to me, this is the water that goes forth to Galilee, that lies eastward, and is gone down to Arabia and has reached as far as the sea, to the outlet of the water. And it shall heal the waters, and it shall come to pass, that every animal of living and moving creatures, all on which the river shall come, shall live, and there shall be very many fish for this water. Water shall go thither, and it shall heal them, and they shall live. Everything on which the river shall come shall live, and fishers shall stand there from En-gedi to En-eglaim and it shall be a place to spread out nets upon, and it shall be distinct. And the fishes thereof shall be as the fishes of the great sea. A very great multitude. But at the outlet of the water, and the turn of it, and where it overflows its banks, they shall not heal at all. They are given to salt, and every fruit tree shall grow by the river, even on the bank of it, on this side and on that side. They shall not decay upon it, neither shall their fruit fail. They shall bring forth the first fruit of their early crop. For these their waters shall come forth of the sanctuary, and their fruit shall be for meat, and their foliage for health."
This vision in Ezekiel goes counter to the geography of the area. He is speaking caught up in a great vision. He is not speaking of a material world. He was speaking of that which was to come. The material world concerning the Dead Sea. And this is from George Adam Smith, The Historical Geography of the Holy Land, one of the best geographical volumes ever done in this area of the world. Here's the material geography.
Perhaps, "there is no region of our earth where Nature and History have more cruelly conspired, where so tragic a drama has obtained so awful a theatre," and many other parts of the world. "The effect of historical catastrophes has been heightened by their occurrence amid scenes of beauty and peace. It is otherwise here. Nature, when she has not been herself been, by some convulsion, the executioner of [God's] judgment, has added every aggravation of horror to the cruelty of the human avenger, or the exhaustion of the doomed. The history of the Dead Sea opens with Sodom and Gomorrah, and may be said to close with the Massacre of Masada."
And he goes on to describe the eerie, unearthly scenery. The Dead Sea, almost 1300 feet below sea level, is a macabre place indeed. Ezekiel's vision of the Dead Sea was of a spiritual state. And in fact, it isn't this macabre physical realm, but in this scintillating spiritual realm, that these two polarities of man's possibility came together in the first century BC and produced the crucible out of which they, all the major religions of the Western world, received their form. There is not a major religion in the West that was not reformed at this time in this place. They were all recast. None of the religions today were made any later than 100 BC. The anvil of transformation was not in some mythical past pre-glacier or in some other planet or in some other time scale but about 2100 years ago in this location.
It was impossible until after the Second World War to state this with any infirmity, and increasingly since the first discovery of some of the Dead Sea Scroll materials in 1947, it has become increasingly apparent that this is so, and that this was so to such an extent and amplitude that by today, by the mid-1980s, our sense of history is reeling with the recognition that all of the major religions of the West come out of the same crucible, that they are all siblings from the same family. That there is no real difference between Judaism and Christianity, and there is no essential difference between Islam or Christianity or Judaism. And that, in fact, one can stretch it even to include Mahayana Buddhism, which was also made at this time and owed a great deal to this synthesis at this location. And so, we could list Mahayana Buddhism, Judaism and Christianity as three religions, with Islam coming along later on as a fourth that were recast by this.
What is this event? We have been tracing this from the standpoint of Alexandria and realizing that all of the threads of meaning which human beings had developed for themselves, had been woven together and blended together in Alexandria about 300 BC. By 200 BC the integration was already affected. It already had happened but had happened only within the confines of the city of Alexandria. But the reverberations of this integration, this powerful synthesis, made their way, almost by an osmotic underground telegraph and began super saturating the world, the Hellenistic world, super saturating it with the possibility of growth.
It's like introducing the possibility of a super saturated solution everywhere. And then whatever tincture of tradition was there, the crystallization would take that tincture, but all the crystals would be of the same structure. And this is what we will see happening now from the first century BC through the first century AD and those two hundred years this crystallization took place, and all of the various religious traditions have a similar structure, one which can be discerned intellectually, one which can be expressed even theologically. All of the major religions which were of a similar structure though, attempted to cover up the origins shared among the others and thus reclaim for themselves distinctiveness.
And so it is that until the Second World War, this period was the least known period in all of historical time. Rabbinic Judaism closed the book on it and said it does not pertain to us. And the Christians followed suit. The Buddhists, in their own way, followed suit, and the Roman world quickly learned to see other meanings in the events that had swept them by and turned their backs. The Greeks thinking to themselves that this is just yet something that is continuing to occur, decided to take it further afield and developed into the Gnostic vision and the Hermetic Dialogues. The fact remains, and remains in increasing clarity, that starting about 100 BC a very strict observance of the rules of purification came into being for an esoteric group called the Essenes. And it's the Essenes who founded most of these out of the way wilderness monastic communities. The Qumran community on the Dead Sea, right where the Jordan River runs into the Dead Sea, being the world famous one at the current time, there are others that have not been found yet. They will be found. There were also Essene communities in the cities. There were places much like Whirling Rainbow. Only places that had a community sense based upon the documentation that we have now.
In two of the Dead Sea Scrolls, one of them called the Community Rule or occasionally when it was first translated, was called the Manual of Discipline. The second is the Damascus Rule, and it is this that I wish to bring forth tonight as much as I can. The Damascus Rule scroll was one of the few indications that we had before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, that there was some kind of esoteric community. As early as 1895, fragments of the Damascus Scroll were found in the genizah of the Old Temple in Cairo. The genizah is a part of a Jewish synagogue, where sacred literature that is no longer used is stored and put away. It's like a high-class garbage pail. You cannot destroy this literature. So, there are shelves and little cubby hole area set aside. This is the genizah, and in 1895, fragments of this were found and published as Fragments of the Zadokite Work. And we will get to the Zadokite material a little later in this series. When we get to the beginnings of esoteric Judaism in Alexandria, we'll get to that. We'll see that primary among esoteric Judaism will be the order of Melchizedek, who will be the invisible, transcendent priest who carries out this most esoteric of all religious operations.
The Damascus Rule has two parts to it, and it is the document that was written probably around 100 BC that began the formation of the Essene communities. It began the formation of Qumran, that is to say, this document now is the center pole around which all the other structures will organize themselves. And as they organize themselves, remember that they're doing this in a planned time-sequence, always. We have to keep in mind how they are not looking at phenomenon as cut-off, as static, as objectively real in their eidetic form, but that all reality occurs in a time-sequencing, and that human beings also are timeline beings. And so, this temporality infuses the vision of everything that is being done and that the temporality is not helter skelter but is in fact a sequential in a very specific geometric design. And in fact, one of the most important distinctions between the Essenes and the rest of the Jewish communities will be the Essene calendar, which is still a very, very mysterious document.
The Essene calendar is distinctly different. Their sense of time reckoning is different. It is different because it is exact and was first based upon a lunar calendar. The month began with the new moon, and the perception of the new moon was almost like classical archaic augury. Individuals in the community were set to observe the first appearance of the moon. And when this happened, runners were sent out to all of the Essene communities, warning them that this particular time period has now begun so that all of your sequential observances, all of your purification rituals and rites now have to be in sync. The reason for this is that they were bringing into manifestation certain elements that were spiritual, that needed to have an ordered pattern on earth in order for them to receive this energy. To put it succinctly, they were making a physical target for a spiritual arrow, and so everything had to be set up exactly right. All of the various communities had to observe this in sync at the same time.
Now the communities, the Jewish communities outside of Judea, outside of what we would call Israel, were referred to collectively as the diaspora. And the diaspora eventually grew to include almost one hundred percent of Judaism. But at this time that we're talking, about 100 BC, it was limited mainly to the city and surrounding Jewish communities of Alexandria and some Jewish communities in the north and Syria, but mainly in Alexandria. Remember now that by 100 BC, the population of Alexandria was somewhat over a million people - Rome was the only city in the world at this time that was anywhere near Alexandria and its population. And out of that population, almost a third of the people were Jewish. So that Alexandria at this time had about 300,000 Jews. The Jewish population of Los Angeles is about 500,000. So, you begin to see, out of a population of about 10 million... so you begin to see the tremendous affinities between Alexandria and Jerusalem and Qumran, which is just down the slopes. Jerusalem is up on top of the mountains, and Qumran is right at the lowest point if not far from it.
The Damascus Rule is the axis around which all of this integration of the community was to be spun. And it consists of two separate sections brought together. The first section is an exhortation to the community. This is why we are doing this. And the second part are the rules, the statutes. This is what we must do. So first the exhortation which is to alert everyone: this is why we are doing it. And second: these are the exact rules that must be followed to the letter. And all of us must follow in the same way. There must be absolute unity. Now, outsiders to this would characterize this as rigidity but to those who were practicing this, this was accuracy.
It's like scientific accuracy today. One cannot tell without accuracy that a change is taking place when the changes are so minute, day-by-day. It is only by the synchronistic accuracy of many of these communities that the subtle changes that could be seen and noticed, perhaps not day-by-day, but surely month-by-month. And this was according to a planned unfolding which they were acquainted with.
Now the moon, the lunar calendar of the Essene communities, when they began to get very good at this, say, by 70 or 60 BC, proved to be not as effective as they would like, because the problem with the moon, with the lunar calendar, of course, is that it's out of sync with the solar year. And one needs to have this kind of solar accuracy, because it is the solar year that has an exact repetition. The lunar year changes from year-to-year subtly. And so, the Essene community around 70 to 60 BC went back to their material and began using the Book of Jubilees for a new calendar system, and they integrated in their system the calendar that is evident here in the Book of Jubilees. We will incidentally find later on that the Gospel of John is written in an exact festival form, and that one can read it according to Essene festival form. It does not follow any kind of Greek literary structure. It uses the Greek language, right, and it uses Greek terminology, but it does this in a Jewish structure, in a Jewish syntax, which is particularly Essene because he is showing this cycle has happened exactly as predicted and here is the full life that displays in one moment, one individual, one timeline being, the culmination of it all. This is what is being said, as we will see.
I won't go into the Book of Jubilees tonight. There is an edition of it here in R. H. Charles Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament. And he says the very first sentence, "The Book of Jubilees is in certain limited respects the most important book in this volume for the student of religion." And he goes on to tell us why. So, the Damascus Rule now is being written, about 100 BC, when the communities are first starting to sense the need for accuracy and commitment. So, the exhortation and the Damascus Rule runs something like this in order to alert everyone to the strategic importance of all this here.
"Now, all you who know righteousness and consider the works of God. For he has a dispute with all flesh and will condemn all those who despise him. For when they were unfaithful and forsook Him. He hid His face from Israel and His Sanctuary and delivered them up to the sword."
Pay attention here to the word face. Recall now that face is, the face of God is something that is only visible now in the shared gestalt vision of the religious community, the perfected that the face of God can no longer be seen by one person. That God's face now is manifested what the Essenes would call the angel of the presence'. That the angel of the presence' descends upon the congregation and the integrity of the congregation convinces the angel of the presence that the necessary form of community is operative and present. And then the angel of the presence announces and discloses the face of God.
So, this is what they're talking in just this concerted, definite way. So, the Lord has hid his face from Israel. They no longer can see this, and it is not in his sanctuary. He is no longer there in the temple which means that the sacrifices in the temple are ineffective. They are, in fact profane. And in fact, then, the temple is profane. To continue to sacrifice is profane and to continue to use that temple is profane.
The new tabernacle - as the Qumran community will say over and over again in esoteric language, but unmistakable when one gets the gist of it - the new tabernacle is in the books, not in the building. It's in the books, and the new king is not a person, but is the community itself. This will come out. And the priest is he who will come, given this kingdom, and given this tabernacle. It will call forth the priest. And of course, the priest will be the Messiah. But the Messiah, conveying the face of God in its dimensions as a man, will be preceded by an angel of the presence who will deliver this Messiah, like the angel of the presence, delivered the face of God to the congregation. This deliverer, the essence called the teacher of righteousness'. The Teacher of Righteousness. So, he'll come first, then the Messiah.
So, this is what they're saying. Of course, this hadn't been read for two thousand years - the Damascus Rule. We're able to read it now in translation, but for two thousand years no one even knew it existed. But remembering the covenant of the forefathers, He, God, left a remnant to Israel and did not deliver it up to be destroyed. They considered themselves the faithful remnant, all that was left. The true shards of the holy vessel. Later on, much later on in esoteric Judaism, these shards of the remnants of the vessel of the elect will be what the Hasidim say is the divine spark within certain individuals, and that this must be recollected and put back so that that transformative vessel is re-established, and that transformative vessel is the holy community.
The New Jerusalem is not a geographical point, but it is a sociological level that must be achieved, it must be attained. He left a remnant to Israel and did not deliver it up to be destroyed, and in the Age of Wrath, 390 years after he had given them into the hand of King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, he visited them, and he caused a plant root to spring from Israel and Aaron to inherit his land and to prosper on the good things of his earth.
And they perceived their iniquity and recognized that they were guilty men. Yet for 20 years they were like blind men, groping for the way. That is to say, they're saying now in the Damascus Rule, they felt called upon to extract themselves and form this community, or these communities - we should use a plural. They knew that they were not right, that they were not quite there, that there was a lot wrong with them still. And in fact, for a whole generation, for 20 years, they stumbled along, held together by the integrity of their desire to find out, what is the right way to do it. So, for 20 years they were like blind men groping for the way. And God observed their deeds, that they sought him with a whole heart. And he raised for them a teacher of righteousness to guide them in the way of his heart.
So, the first phase, the first stage, was for them to come to together on the basis of faith and hope and belief. They didn't know how to do it. They knew that they had to be exacting, but how to be exacting, about what should we be exacting, they didn't know. But their groping prepared this next phase of receiving the Teacher of Righteousness. And so, he comes to guide them in the way of God's heart. We don't get to the mind of God. We get here in the second phase to the heart of God for the heart of God, the teacher of righteousness, understands and is able to convey that to the community. And what it does to the community is that it tightens it up into an accurate form to receive the next phase. And he made known to the latter generations that which God had done to the latter generation. The congregation of traitors to those who had departed from the way, this was the time of which it was written. Like a stubborn heifer, thus was Israel's stubborn.
This is from Hosea, one of the minor prophets, the late prophets. "When the scoffer arose." And now the scoffer here is an individual. It's a specific individual. We do not know who in history he was. We do not know who in history. The Teacher of Righteousness was the first one. We know that the last teacher of righteousness because this became an office. You see, we know the last teacher of righteousness was John the Baptist. The scoffer was a wicked priest. That is to say, there was someone that they had in mind, a personage who was a wicked priest.
And you have to understand here now that there are all kinds of factions going on here. There are, for instance, misled sex who are misled out of ignorance but not out of malice. But the scoffer is someone who does know and who misleads out of malice. And the Scoffer, of course, will continue to reappear. This is an archetypal structure. All of its components are present at any given moment, any given day, any given year, any given lifetime.
And the beauty of the Dead Sea Scroll material is that they accurately point out all of the elements that need to be present. It's one of the litmus tests that you can apply to see whether something comes from deep within. Is to see that all these elements are there. The whole pattern is complete. So, there's a scoffer who comes just at the time the teacher of righteousness comes. In other words, they come in tandem. The scoffer will use the mind; the teacher of righteousness will use the heart. The scoffer will use a cynical, bitter critique. With his insightfulness the teacher of righteousness will elicit wholeness. These are our polar opposite techniques. So, the scoffer arose. When the scoffer arose. Who shed over Israel the waters of lies. You can imagine that in a desert climate, the waters of lies, you're going to be nourished by lies. But what can grow in that? Only these terrible plants. He caused them to wander in a pathless wilderness, laying low the everlasting heights, abolishing the ways of righteousness, and removing the boundary with which the forefathers marked out their inheritance.
Now these boundaries notice here. All the time there's the possibility of innuendo of at least a double sense of geography or of metaphysical significance. Sort of two different axes, a horizontal, which is geographical, and a vertical, which is a metaphysical or religious, we should say here the boundaries of the inheritance of the forefathers were the defining confluences. The banks that allowed for tradition to... And remember now that just before the Damascus Rule - not much more, ten years at the most, probably five years - the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, the twelve sons of Jacob, the twelve tribes all brought together in a single mandala, a single vision of wholesomeness. This is what we have received from our forefathers. This is what it means to be of the Jewish faith, to have taken cognizance of this entire circle of knowledge cycle of behavior. The wholesomeness is in the acceptance of living a life within the shape of meaning.
So, they say here the scoffer leads away from that into a pathless wilderness. Abolishing the ways of righteousness and removing the boundary. With which the forefathers had marked out their inheritance, so that that inheritance would no longer be able to be transmitted. The Essenes are saying that that inheritance is not just a static inheritance. We're not just receiving it blindly, but that from age to age that inherit in our town. We not only must receive the inheritance, but we must tighten it up so that it comes through to a new generation to see. That we have, in fact, a new covenant. In fact, the beginning of the cycle will be at the festival of the renewal of the covenant called [asuka?]. This festival of the renewal of the covenant will become extremely important. And it links up. It's adjacent to the Passover Festival. It's all linked up together.
So, at the Last Supper will be an observance of the end of time. From the old inheritance and the beginning of a new time, with that old inheritance sharpened and transformed into a new. So, the Last Supper will become the focal point, not the crucifixion, but the Last Supper will become the focal point of the transition, the transformation. This is why the transformation takes place in the Mass. And the Mass is about communion, not about crucifixion. They don't pass around pieces of wood in the community. They pass around bread. It's because of this nature here. So, the scoffer has done this so that he might call down on them the curses of his covenant. So, the scoffer is rather like the angel of the presence of the Satan. So that the scoffer, the wicked priest, here is now a priest of Satan. These curses, incidentally the word curse in Hebrew - kelalah - is very close to what would be called a judicial point. That is, in terms of the law, it's being finicky in terms of the law. This is the esoteric nature of a curse. It would not be a curse if one saw into the meaning, the spirit of the law. It is that visionary capacity to see into the spirit of the law that saves one. It is being limited to the exact letters of the law that condemns one. It makes it a curse and is that kind of myopia that magnetizes one to the manipulation.
And we'll see, of course, that the final presentation of the old law, what would be called in Latin the use talionis, the law of the talon. An eye for an eye' is exactly what is transfigured, and this exact transfiguration takes place in the revision instead of an eye for an eye to love your enemy. And the structure that's there is that in these transcendent functions, an eye for an eye' rests finely in its equilibrium. Justice is an equilibrium, rests its equilibrium upon a fulcrum of terror. Not fear, but terror. Terror is the transcendental focus of it. And as long as it's an eye for an eye, terror remains as the existential fulcrum for activity. For human beings to love thy enemy puts the fulcrum on wisdom and wisdom balances terror and love, and the three of them together then go into an equilibrium which produces the new world. We'll see that.
Anyway, the Damascus Rule is saying that the scoffer now comes at the same time as the teacher of righteousness, and he leads people away. He leads them into the curses of his covenant and deliver them up to the avenging sword of the covenant, the avenging sword. You see, his covenant is always going to have this avenging sword kind of mentality hidden underneath it. You will accept our version, or we'll kill you. This is the unwritten code of this kind of tyranny. You will believe or you will die. Who will say this? The Moslem armies will say this. We have two choices: you can believe or die. It's a very interesting play here. For they sought smooth sang things and preferred illusions. And they watched for breaks and chose the fair neck.
You see when they get into this, this finicky lawyer-type mentality about religion, they choose the next to fall upon. They watch for breaks. They're not living in a flow where there's a gist of a human being. Everything is portioned out. And, oh, you did this, and we're keeping a dossier on you, and we've got you, this kind of mentality. It's an informant kind of a mentality. Who will live this kind of a life? Judas Iscariot. He will not be able to help himself. He will have what Theodore Reik called the urge to confess'. And in order to have something to confess, he commits evil. The whole thing happens together. It's all from this kind of the false covenant of the scoffer.
And they justified the wicked and condemned the just. And they transgressed the covenant and violated the precept. They banded together against the life of the righteous and loathed all who walked in perfection. They pursued them with the sword and exalted in the strife of the people. And the anger of God was kindled against their congregation, so that he ravaged all their multitude, and their deeds were defilement before him. Here. Now, all you who enter the covenant, and I will unstop your ears concerning the ways of the wicked. God loves knowledge. Wisdom and understanding he has set before him. And prudence and knowledge serve him. Patience and much forgiveness are with him towards those who turn from transgression. But power might. And great flaming wrath by the hand of all the angels of destruction towards those who depart from the way. Abhor the precept this tone will carry through this entire era.
And it is this tone that will produce the Apocalypse. That is the book called the Apocalypse. The revelation attributed to John. It's not by John at all. It is, in fact not a Christian document at all. It is still Essene Judaism. And we'll see that the Apocalypse, the revelation is not by John, it's not a Christian document, but is written at the time of a great revolt in Hadrian's time, around 130 AD, when an Israeli general named [Simon] bar Kokhba tried to reinstate the Jewish kingdom, and he was defeated on the shores of the Dead Sea about 135 AD. The Apocalypse will be from that era, from that deal, and we'll carry this through this tone of God and will enkindle his revenge against the wicked. Remember now that the essential change that will come, the transformation that will come, is to love thy enemy. This removes terror from its fulcrum and puts the emphasis upon wisdom.
It is still undifferentiated 100 BC in the Essene communities. We have to get over the idea that they were immediately perfected. They didn't know. These elements were still jumbled together by the time that the Damascus Rule was written. They will progressively be articulated and seen for what they are, and one of the first documents that will do that, that we'll get to, will be the Gospel of Mark. And the Gospel of Mark is one of the first times that all of this is articulated and presented, and when it's presented in an articulate form in Alexandria - Mark wrote it about 60 AD - it will seem like a mystery play, because only a few who have lived through this will understand what it's about, what has happened. To others, it will seem incomprehensible. Love thy enemies. We'll see all that happen.
So, they say, we're going to unstop your ears concerning the ways of the wicked. And at the same time, God loves knowledge, wisdom, and understanding. Two of those things together. So, all of the angels of destruction towards those who depart from the way and abhor the precept. This is the apocalypse. They shall have no remnant or survivor. For from the beginning God chose them, not from the beginning. This is an eternal pattern which is manifesting now, but the now is a timeline phase form of existence. It takes a while to come in, and then it manifests itself and then takes a while for it to penetrate. So, the now is not like today, or this week or this year, but the now is like a long now over many generations, coming only into fullness within a certain time. And of course, they're computing all the time, and they will find the exact time. In fact, it will be so exact that they'll be runners out between all the countries looking for the manifestation.
This is why the three wisemen are journeying from the East and see the guiding star, because they know it is time now for the full manifestation. It's been coming into focus exactly right on time. And here it is with all this, with the jumbling together of vengeance and wisdom. Sophia and lex talionis is the notion that God has hid his face. And because we can't see his face yet, we don't have a chance to articulate these and see that they don't go together. That one belongs to an old way that no longer holds, no longer obtains, and that there's a new way that hasn't quite yet begun, hasn't quite yet obtained, so that there's a point, almost like at the apex of a trajectory where the sense of no gravity obtains. Where there's nothing really to hold on to precisely because we're at the apex of a trajectory between the old and the new, the new not yet begun, the old no longer effective. And this will be the point at which the Messiah comes in, sort of a zero gravity, metaphysical historical point. And because of that, freedom of movement can restructure the human community because that work can be done so easily with a sort of a no gravity condition. The gravity being, of course, a historical necessity and physical laws. They'll all be suspended at some moment.
Here, now my sons and I will uncover your eyes, that you may see and understand the works of God, that you choose that which pleases him, and reject that which he hates. That you may walk perfectly in all his ways, and not follow after thoughts of the guilty inclination and after eyes of lust. For through them great men have gone astray, and the mighty heroes have stumbled from former times till now. Because they walked in the stubbornness of their heart. And the heavenly watchers fell. And they were caught because they did not keep the commandments of God. And their sons also fell, who were tall as cedar trees, and whose bodies were like mountains. All flesh on dry land perished. There were they were as though they had never been because they did their own will, and did not keep the commandment of their maker, so that his wrath was kindled against them. Through it the children of Noah went astray together with their kin, and they were cut off. Abraham did not walk in it, and he was accounted friend of God, because he kept the commandments of God, and did not choose his own will. And he handed them down to Isaac and Jacob, who kept them, and were recorded as friends of God, and party to the covenant forever.
So, we're getting now back into the timeline of the tradition. Abraham is excellent because he was the man of sound heart. Wisdom is always thought of as profound, as understanding life, understanding what it is about, what it is to be human, and to have found the right way and to be able to pass that on to his son Isaac, who then passes it on to his son Jacob, who then passes it on to his twelve sons.
So, they right here in the Damascus Rule and the exhortation, the children of Jacob strayed through them and were punished in accordance with their error. And their sons in Egypt walked in the stubbornness of their hearts, conspiring against the commandments of God, and each of them doing that which seemed right in his own eyes. They ate blood, and he cut off their males in the wilderness. And then they go on through this, that at every step of the way, the passing of the covenant at every phase of the way, seems to have always initially found a lack in man, but that through man's determination to understand he has been able to right himself in return back to the fullness of the covenant, but that the key here is that his understanding could not return him back to the fullness of the covenant until he had learned heart energy. Until his wisdom of the heart had grown. This was the point that was needed.
So, then they go on and I'll just give you one more paragraph and then we'll taper off. But with the remnant which held fast to the commandments of God. He made his covenant with Israel forever, revealing to them the hidden things in which all Israel had gone astray. He unfolded before them his holy Sabbaths and his glorious feasts, the testimonies of his righteousness, and the ways of his truth. What are these that he's unfolding before them? He's unfolding the Sabbaths, the festivals. These are ways of organizing time, of making sacred temporality. And the easiest thing for a man to go astray in is to misunderstand organizations of temporality because there is only one right way in which reality unfolds itself, the real and all other. Computations lead away from the real into illusion, into violence, into viciousness, into decay. So that the portioning out of the Sabbaths, the portioning out of the feasts are presenting the right calendar to man, and that this calendar can be observed with integrity from year to year.
But with wisdom he sees that the integrity leads somewhere, that there is a purpose to this, but that the purpose is incumbent upon the timely revealing of the next stage, and then the next stage, and then the next stage. And without this timely revealing of it, without man participating in this, the next stages do not happen. That instead of time remaining coherent and moving towards its eternal purpose, it frays like a wire that a cable, that phrase into all the little wires and all of the energy, instead of going to something that needs to work, just goes off every which way and produces static. And this is the illusionary world. This is the confusing static of ill purpose.
What is the purpose then? One must re-braid all these back together to that central conduit that carries the divine power because there's something that needs to be done, there's an occurrence that needs to be done. So, the Damascus Rule says this is what has been given to us: the Sabbaths, his glorious feasts, the testimonies of his righteousness, the testimonies of the twelve tribes, the making of the circle of the of the true way and his ways and the ways of his truth and the desires of his will, which a man must do in order to live, he must do it.
And they dug a well rich in water. And he who despises it shall not live. Yet they wallowed in the sin of man and in ways of uncleanliness. And they said, this is our way. But God and his wonderful mysteries forgave them their sin and pardoned their wickedness. And he built them a sure house in Israel, which, like has never existed from former times till now. It never has existed before.
What is this new house? This is the new tabernacle. Where is that tabernacle? It's in the books. You know the main structure at Qumran. The main structure had two elements that were brought together. One of them was a pool. They call it a swimming pool. It was a baptizing pool. It had fourteen steps going down into it. And this was on the ground level and on the second level above it was a scriptorium. They found the fragments of a table. It had, in fact, it had a plaster top over the wood. And they patiently pieced together in the 1970s all the fragments of this plaster and found that it was a table 15ft long. And they found a brass inkwell, and they found a pottery inkwell, and it still had little traces of the kind of ink that was made out of tree gum and lampblack. And in this, in this scriptorium above the baptizing pool, is the essential tandem that made Qumran work because the tabernacle is in the books, and the king is in the community. But only when that is working and operating does the face of God come and infuse it all with reality. At that point, one enters into the waters of life.
So, this is what was there in the monastery. It was designed specifically to work like a physics cyclotron would work. All of that energy was brought together for a purpose. And the purpose was to discern in oneself the transformation, the transformation. And so, they say here at the end of this paragraph, in the exhortation of the Damascus Rule. "He built them a sure house in Israel whose like has never existed from former times till now. Those who hold fast to it are destined to live forever. And all the glory of Adam shall be theirs. As God ordained for them by the hand of the prophet Ezekiel."
And here they quote Ezekiel. This is what we began with tonight. Ezekiel saying, "the priests, the Levites, and the sons of Zadok, who kept the charge of my sanctuary, when the children of Israel strayed from me, they shall offer me fat and blood." That's Ezekiel 44:15. The Damascus Rule says the priests are the converts of Israel who departed from the land of Judah, and the Levites are those who joined them. The sons of Zadok are the elect of Israel. The men called by name, who shall stand at the end of days, behold the time when they lived, and the number of their trials, and the years of their sojourn, and the exact list of their deeds. And they go on to become ever more specific and saying all this has a design. All of this is a boundary, a shape of meaning, which when it comes to our time, we are receiving it and are going to pass it on in a new way. And that person who guarantees that we are passing it on in the right way is the teacher of righteousness, who they say has finally come to us.
So, this is an introduction and I think you can see from the tremendous élan that was being engendered at this time the Damascus Rule would hold all the way through into the first century AD, but added to it - and we'll get to this next week - added to it about mid-century, around 50 BC, was what has been called the Manual of Discipline or the, translated here it's called the Community Rule. And we'll see that with the Community Rule, that the shape of the community becomes ever more refined. And as soon as the Community Rule becomes refined, and the definition of the shape of the manifestation of the face of God becomes ever clearer, the next development in the scene phases will be the third great document from the Dead Sea Scrolls, the scroll of The War of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darkness. And we'll see that the Damascus Rule, the Manual of Discipline, and the War Scroll follow in a sequence. And as the first century BC winds down to zero BC, increasingly, the new capacity that they have for self-consciousness reveals yet another phase. And then that phase reveals another phase. And when we get to the phase of the scroll of the wars, the War of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darkness, we find a change that happens because it gets to what Jung calls an enantiodromia. It gets to a cosmic polarity so that the only thing that can change, that will be not a teacher of righteousness, but the Messiah.
Well, we'll see some more of that next week. Sorry to rough you up with so much accuracy, but that's how they were.
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