Archetypal Alexandria

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Ancient Rome: Rome, Essenes, Alexandria, and the Book of Enoch
Presentation 32 of 54

Archetypal Alexandria
Version 1
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, July 23, 1985

Transcript:

This tape was made at the Whirling Rainbow lecture of Roger. We're on Tuesday, July 23rd, 1985.

This is the beginning of an ongoing structure which has taken a new turn and a new form. The series of courses on archetypal Alexandria, which means not just the Alexandria that was historically there, but the Alexandria, which was psychologically still here. The central thesis, if you need a thesis, is that the collective unconscious of man is not an abstraction. It is, as Jung pointed out, an objective psyche. You might close that door. Are you with me? It's very easy in our time to fall prey to two parallel fantasies. Or if you want to use logical terms, fallacies. The collective. Unconscious level is real. It operates as real as any phenomenal realm operates. In fact, it's more powerful. But those archetypes. And the word ark in Greek does not mean old or ancient. It means beginning. It means the original. It means go the starting place. These are the structures of the psyche, which are at the beginning, so that the whole genesis of the human mind, the whole genesis of human consciousness, is built upon them. And there is a geometry of this. But the expressive content of those archetypal images was brought together and precipitated in a new way about 2000 years ago, so that the archetypal level of our unconscious today was made at that time, created at that time. It is alive in our consciousness, in our minds, largely on the feeling level. Our comportment towards feeling and nature is largely archetypal and structured at this time.

It's very difficult to understand that they are not abstract, that there's no such thing as an ambiguous archetype. That they are startlingly real and function specifically with a precision which can be understood and which can be appreciated. One of the archetypes. Is the book. The book form itself is an archetype. There never were books until the first century AD. Not anywhere. The making of a book was a spiritual vision of structural presentation. And it was Christian in origin. There were never books. Until there had been a Christ. Now, this is a very startling realization, in fact. And it's only recently that we have come to appreciate the significance of this. Recently, in the last couple of years, that this has surfaced as a conscious talisman of understanding. That a book is an archetype, its structure, its presentation, its function, its whole symbolic significance. And it presents. The archetype of Christ. When I was doing work 20 years ago for advanced degrees, one of the works that I centered on was the Book of Kells. There was something about the Book of Kells that said to me, Byzantium and all the other humanities professors said, you're full of you know what? It's Irish. And I said, I know it's Irish, but I see that as also Byzantine. I see that it is an ancient Greek prototype. And the illuminated manuscript is the Book of Light meant to be read not with the mind so much, but to be envisioned by the spirit.

Which is why, when you look at the Book of Kells or the Book of Durrow or the Lindisfarne Gospel, you can't really read it. You have to be a hell of a scholar to be able to read it. They were not meant to be read. They were meant to be seen. We have to go to India to the word darshan. There was such a thing as darshan of the book, which conveyed to those who were there unspoken, unmitigated by the mind, the presence of the Savior. And it's fitting that today at Trinity College in Dublin, the Book of Kells is displayed one page at a time. They turn a leaf each day. And it's due to the great spiritual understanding of the Irish Renaissance in the late 19th century that this kind of understanding was made. Stephanie McKenna, the the great translator of Plotinus into English, lived at that time W.B. Yeats. A it was a great era of understanding. Two years ago, 1983, the British Academy published a book called The Birth of the Codex. In the birth of the Codex. It isn't a very long book, but it's generally not available. So I want to give you some of the evidence and some of the argument. The form of written communication was always in a role. The only exception to that at all were the little handheld clay tablets that have cuneiform.

And if you go to the park sometimes and you, um, have them bring out some of the little cuneiform tablets that they have and you place them in your hand, they fit right in the palm of your hand, so that the act of writing with the stylus, of making the indentation was a personal handheld medium. This, uh, matrix of, uh, united the I, the mind and the hands together was eventually symbolized in what were called the cylinder seals. And the cylinder seals are the most archaic record that we have of of sacred imagery, sacred imagery in terms of pictures with usually a son with a royal, uh, king, maybe holding a royal lions in each hand a la Gilgamesh. But the Chaldean, Assyrian, Babylonian cylinder seals were this, uh, spiritual matrix, very symbolic in a very real way. The book was that the book was a revolution in consciousness. It was a transformation of the mind which those individuals of the ancient world who had used scrolls and rolls, refused to adopt. Now, in general usage, the book the codex did not completely achieve parity with rolls until about 300 AD, and then after 300 AD, with the Triumph of Constantine and the triumph of Christianity, the use of scrolls or rolls fell off very sharply within a hundred years of 300 A.D. by 400 AD, probably only 10 or 15% of the communications were still on scrolls, and that was declining rapidly.

But the introduction of the codex is contemporaneous with the rise of Christianity. The codex, in fact, was assigned in the first century AD that you're dealing with a Christian material as distinct from Jewish, as distinct from Roman, as distinct from Greek, as distinct from Egyptian, or anything else. The codex was symbolically a Christian vehicle of transformation. Now the codex originally was a parchment. The earliest records that we have from about 50 BC is that somehow the earliest uses of of little parchment notebooks were used by Roman writers like Cicero or Horus to keep notes in. It was scratch paper to them. About 75 to 100 years later, the Christian vision of transformation saw the process of making these parchment notebooks in a spiritual light, and adopted it exclusively for the vehicle to convey the spiritual transformational reality, not message, but reality that had been delivered to them. What makes parchment so weird is that parchment, in order to be made at all, has to coordinate all of its processes simultaneously in order to make parchment. Now parchment is a animal hide a membrane. In fact, the Latin name for parchment was membrane, which has to be stretched and it has to be treated simultaneously with all the processes in the stretching, so that it remains stretched, so that the natural pattern of the skin of the physical animal is transformed into a supernatural vehicle by the hand of man, by a very complex set of processes, which cannot be done in a serial order, but must be done simultaneously.

All of them. Because once parchment is set, it's very hard to work with or change. This was a symbolic vision which the early Christians and in fact we can now name the individual who introduced this was Mark John Mark, the writer of the gospel of Mark, the writer of the Secret Gospel of Mark, the founder of the Christian Church in Alexandria. And he did this around 50 to 50 5 to 60 A.D., somewhere in the 50s A.D., and the gospel of Mark was the very first codex that was written specifically with this symbolic view in mind. Before Christ, we have seen meticulously that there were many currents of wisdom traditions, and there were even attempts at bringing some of these traditions together. But the attempts were always a braiding kind of a process. The individual filaments of the traditions were never broken, so if one had something syncretistic, it was always this braiding kind of a process. After Christ. Immediately there is the weaving of the filaments together to make a new fabric. There are no longer considered valuable in their individuality at all. They have no longer any, uh, ability as individual traditions. They are only usable to make this woven fabric. And so the nature of the human mind changes from 50 BC to 50 A.D., a total structural change.

Now you can say, how do we know that it was Christ who did this? There is no other reason. There is no other focus. The obscuration of this at the time was due to Augustus Caesar. As we have seen, Augustus Caesar styled himself as the saviour of the world, and he put the world back together into a new form, which was a political form, and it was a collecting of all traditions together. But Augustus collection was an a collection of agglomeration. It's the way power works in a human way. Bringing it together like that. Holding all the realms of power in a hand. Agglomeration. The nature of the change in consciousness was not an agglomeration. It was an interpenetration of all the traditions together to make a new fabric of vision, which was not political at all, had nothing to do with politics. The saying render unto Caesar what is Caesar's is very poignant. The exoteric, mundane organization of life along political lines is a Caesar invention. But the change of the nature of consciousness is a Christian revelation based on transformation. It's not based upon reform. It's not based upon compromise. It is not based upon a good, sound judgment over the ages. It is based upon an instantaneous radical transformation so that there is such a thing. And I'm going to use Maurice Nichols, a phrase in here. There is such a thing as a new man, a new man, not nouveau riche, not newly into power, but a different kind of a human being whose consciousness now is not based upon the human tradition, but is based upon an eternal condition.

And it is this new man that becomes the the focus in the first century AD, it's almost a truism, and it's almost a too simplistic to talk this way. But I'm going to start off this way. The first ascension in the new dispensation was visible already by about 40 AD, and the dissension was between Paul and John Mark. Pauline Christianity. Is extremely agile, extremely subtle, extremely fine. But it's a braiding together. Mark's Christianity is a transformation. Mark's Christianity eventually yields to a disenchantment with any kind of a structure, and is the fount for Gnosticism, is the fount for the revival of Hermeticism, is a fount for the development of esoteric Christianity, which ever after that never lost its lineage. It is still intact to this day. Paul trying to fit in, trying to make the bridges, trying to cover himself not only as a Jew, but as a Roman citizen, tried to work Christianity somehow into a new braided cord of concord in the Gospel of Luke and in the acts of the apostles, which is the sequel to the Gospel of Luke. Again and again we see that when Paul is pressed and backed into a corner, his ultimate ace in the hole is that he is a Roman citizen.

And you can't do this to me. He is willing to begin in the synagogues, trying to bring the Christian message to the Jews in the synagogues. They are always saying, we don't want you. And he's always saying, I shake the dust off my feet here, and I'm going to the Gentiles. But I came to you first. And when he is seized by the Jewish communities, wherever he is, and threatened to be prosecuted under Jewish law, he appeals to the Roman jurisdiction in the places, saying, they can't do this to me because I am a Roman citizen. In the acts of the apostles, the penultimate drama in Paul's whole career. He has brought publicly to account by the Sanhedrin of the major Temple in Jerusalem. And they want to try him on heresy. Now, this is very peculiar because there were all kinds of heretical Jewish sects, as we have seen, so called heretical Jewish sects. There wasn't a single Judaism at all. There were many. There were at least three major traditions. If not more. And there wasn't anything in what Paul said that would have caused the Sanhedrin of the of the temple, the central Temple in Jerusalem, to bring him up before these charges, except that he was doing the same thing that Jesus did. And Jesus was saying, this is going to displace the old law, not replace it, but culminate it.

And by culminating it, transforming it, and displacing it in that way, he was brought to account by the Sanhedrin, not because he was offering some variant of Judaism, but because he meant to completely eclipse it. And when this is done, he appeals to the Roman authorities. He says, they can't touch me. You have put me in prison without a trial, and you cannot do this because this goes against Roman law. And that law was made by Augustus Caesar. You cannot imprison a Roman citizen without a trial by his peers. And further than that, Luke himself, who was there, recounts that personally. He saw Paul say, and further, I demand my rights as a Roman citizen to have my case heard by the Emperor himself. And the. And Luke says in the acts of the apostles that the Roman authorities began to tremble, their lips shake, and they realize that something really radical is going on here. Almost no Jews were Roman citizens. The Roman citizenry was a very peculiar legal position, which could only be conferred like an honorarium if you were not born in Rome. Where was Paul born? He was born in Tarsus. Was Tarsus. Tarsus is in Asia minor. Do you remember in our lectures about Cicero that Cicero was made the governor of that whole area, and was positioned in Tarsus for a while, and set up a school there? In fact, he set up one of the most famous stoic schools in the ancient world there in Tarsus.

Paul was born there because of some circumstance of his birth. He was a Roman citizen from birth. We're not sure just what it was. And then he was raised in Jerusalem. He was raised as a Jew, but he never let go of the concept that he was a Roman citizen. And it was this demand that he have his case heard by the Emperor himself. That's the key in this whole issue. They took Paul on a ship that took almost eight months to go to Rome, and they took him before the emperor. In fact, they took him twice. First time he was acquitted. The second time he was beheaded. The position of Jews in the Hellenistic world was very peculiar. They were not citizens of where they lived. They were specifically excluded, except in one place, and the only place that they were citizens of any place at all was in Alexandria. And in fact, Alexander himself, in setting up the city, made the exception for the Jews. I think the Greek firm was isopoliteia, which meant that they were, uh, on a par with the Greeks, able to observe their own living laws, but considered as Greeks, or as the firm would have been in Alexander's time, Macedonians. In fact, the Jewish community in Alexandria, even up into the first century BC, referred to themselves as Macedonians, just like Jews living in L.A., we'll call themselves Americans.

Are you Israeli? They will say, no, I'm American, but I am of the Jewish faith. They're not incommensurate. They're together. And you ask a Jew and Los Angeles, will you give up your American citizenship? No, no. I am proud to be an American. It doesn't compromise my, uh, observing the Jewish faith and my observing the Jewish faith. In no way abrogates my being a good American. Alexandria was the only place in the classical world where this was true. It was the only avenue by which a Jew could become a Roman citizen by birth. The only way. There were no exceptions. Now, the peculiar thing. Is that Egypt was the most famous province of the Roman Empire. That was not a colony. It did not belong to the Roman people. It did not belong to the Roman Senate. It was a personal possession of the Caesars. Egypt, which was Alexandria, administratively and economically and politically, and population wise and everything. Alexandria was a personal. Possession of the Caesars. The first person to have it as his personal possession was Julius Caesar, and it was Augustus Caesar who claimed the right to come in and take over on that basis from Cleopatra. It belongs in the Roman Empire by virtue of the Emperor. Notice that Paul remembers from childhood the parents telling him, if you are ever in real trouble, you are a Roman citizen. And because of this relationship, you have a right to have your case heard in person by the Emperor, not by the Roman Senate.

They are, for all intents and purposes, on the same level as the Sanhedrin. You can relate to them. Yes. You were a Jew. Yes, you are a Roman. But you are in particular able to claim that you belong in the legal sense to the Roman Emperor and his judgment. Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's. The radical change in John Mark is that he never once identifies himself either as a Jew or as a Roman. He is a new man. He is different. He is radically different, even from his parents. He's as radically different as Jesus was from John the Baptist, though they were born six months apart, though their mothers were cousins. Though the mother of Jesus was with Elizabeth for the last three months of the pregnancy of John the Baptist, because they both received the same vision from the same angel about the tandem birth, about the coming back in. Of this eternal pattern, this archetype. And in Mark we see again and again Jesus saying, of all the sons of women. John the Baptist is the best, but the least person in the kingdom of heaven is so far above the capacities of John the Baptist that it's a whole different realm. There is a radical break and change. Paul was unable to make that transformation. It's not a simplistic thing of just saying that he was still Jewish.

It isn't that at all. In fact, he's more Roman than Jewish. In fact, Paul's really great theological writings are his letters to the Romans, his letters to the Corinthians, especially the Roman, Hellenistic people of Corinth, the Romans in Rome. These are the great developments of his doctrine. And in Paul, we have to recognize that there is a theology that Paul and the very comprehensive sense is a theology. But in John Mark, there is no theology. He's not talking about a theological structure. He's talking about transformation out of this human realm into the kingdom of God. And it's rather like the Buddha saying, don't decorate your raft. The raft is just to get over the ocean, to the other shore, to the other side. Don't worry about it. When the time comes, leave it. It's of no utility other than getting you over. John Mark has this view of religious ceremony. It is only valuable and efficacious to get you over. It has no value in and of itself. But in Paul, the theology, the theological structure becomes all important. In fact, it becomes as important as Roman law was to the Roman citizen. It's your only guarantee of safety. It's your insurance, your salvation is only as good as the theological understanding makes it. And after the great debacle, which we will see, that happened in 202 AD, the Christian church, like a landslide, goes for developing theological doctrine at the expense of transformational reality.

And this is the great heyday when the critics of Christianity were not complaining about Jesus, but about the church. They're not Christians. In fact, the Gnostic, as we will see poignantly, who makes the New Testament? The New Testament was made by a Gnostic. His name was Marcion. He said, you're perverting the whole message. You're perverting the very transformative process, which is the essence of what Christ brought to us. And so he collected for the first time the scattered codexes together and put them together and said, this is this is the New Testament. And right away, as we will see, the planners, the politicizes, the empire builders, the theological bigwigs seize upon this. And they say, no, this is for us to decide what is going to be the New Testament. You're a heretic. And all of this actually did happen, happened largely in Alexandria. So we're focusing on this. We're trying to bring this out because this is very, very, very important. A side light here. Just as a little breather mark makes it very clear that Jesus sent out messengers around the world. He says it very clearly. Luke also has it in there that they were sent around the world, that this wasn't a local message. This was a universal transformation. The consciousness of all mankind has been changed irrevocably. The apostle Thomas was finally sent to India.

The apostle Andrew was sent to Central Asia. It was Philip who first carried the message down into Alexandria. We don't know who the Apostle was, but we have evidence now, which is almost circumstantial to the point of convincing us that some disciple was sent to the New World, that Quetzalcoatl was a disciple. And one of the most amazing correlations of this is the fact that the origins of Mayan sacred books are in codex form, and in fact the earliest coherent Mayan codex were destroyed. By the conquistadors. Because it's very embarrassing to say that you're taking over the country, taking all the gold away from killing hundreds of thousands of people who were very much like yourselves. They have to be called barbarians. They have to be called pagans in order to get away with this. Only two fragments of Mayan codexes were thought to have survived the debacle. But in fact, just a couple of years ago, it was discovered that there was another codex, in fact, a complete codex. In fact, it's now translated as The Mayan Book of the dead and is a revelation indeed, because the discovery in this was that the old Mayan masters, understanding what was happening and familiar with the codex form as necessary to carry the structure of realization and vision, put the leaves of the codex not on the papyrus, not on the parchment, but on ceramics as decorations, and the ceramics were taken and spread out.

And it was only a couple of years ago that somebody realized that the decorations and the ceramics look like pages of a codex, and so they went around the world to all the museums and took photographs of all the ceramics, and they brought them all together. And they have reconstructed the Mayan Book of the dead, a complete codex. And it's discovering the Nag Hammadi manuscripts, because now we can read the cosmology, the cosmological vision of the Mayans. It's very transformative. It's very Gnostic, it's very early Christian. It has nothing to do with the Romanizing Empire building. It has nothing to do with the old vengeful Yahweh Law. It has everything to do with a complete transformation of human consciousness, which everyone shared. It was a worldwide event, a worldwide revelation, the non-commodity material itself. Interesting because they are codexes. The Dead Sea Scrolls are scrolls, but the Nag Hammadi material are codexes. In the Dead Sea Scrolls you have fragments of Plato on scrolls in the material of fragments of Plato on Codexes is a radical change. In fact, one of the earliest large codexes, which we have called the Chester Beatty manuscript, has the entirety of Plato's Republic on a codex which is quite bulky. I think it takes something like nearly 12,000 of lines in minuscule Greek to make. This is a very large, bulky manuscript. Compared to this, the entire New Testament is only about 8000 lines.

Plato's Republic is a third as big as the whole New Testament. This is from the second century AD. This means that there were Christian, an visionaries understanding that they had to use Plato's Republic in a codex form, rather than a rural form, as early as about 150. This is long before there's even such a thing as the New Testament. In fact, one of the distinguishing marks of the codex is that most of the tractates in codex form were small. They weren't meant to be gathered together into large, bulky volumes, but they were meant to be small so that an individual could carry it with them. In fact, it's a very interesting thing because most of the early spiritual literature is of a short nature, not because of the economy of needing to save parchment or paper. As some scholars have said in the last year or two, that has nothing to do with it. It has everything to do with the fact that a person then could memorize a particular codex that you were carrying, so that eventually you wouldn't even need to have the codex. You would have the material in yourself. You would be almost like Ray Bradbury's vision in Fahrenheit 451. People became books. And you want to know what's in Mark, or you want to know what's in John. We want to know what's in Luke. You go to someone who knows that work, someone for whom the mind has been structured in mnemonics, and the character of one's life has been lived in such a way that he or she personifies that book so that the Christian community, the real transformative Christian communities bringing such people together, were the New Testament in themselves, and that it was reducing this to a manipulable text.

That was a theological ploy, an empire building technique that took the lifeblood away from the Christian communities. Because after. After the Gospels are put together into a Bible, into a New Testament, you have the decline of the early primitive Christian communities and the rise of the great Roman Empire church structures. They happened together, the decline of the community and the rise of the church empire. And it takes a while for that to happen, but it's an inevitable process. And of course, we'll see the last individual to understand the absolute importance of individual transformation and the importance of the community of transformed people to hold together was Clement of Alexandria. He becomes one of the great heroes of world history. He becomes one of the most important figures, because he's the last one who remembers how it was from the beginning. He's the last one to remember that the master did not teach a doctrine, but showed a metanoia, a way of taking the mind from its organization on the external world to base it upon the spirit instead. And when the mind is based upon the spirit, you have something entirely different.

If the mind is based upon the external arrangement of the world according to man, then you have something which we call meaning. But when the mind is reoriented, metanoia turned around. It no longer looks for meaning in the human sense, but it looks for a realization in terms of the divine, the kingdom of God. I wrote a page on this this morning. Maybe I'll. I'll put it in here for you. At this time. I can xerox some of these if you like. Meaning and realization of meaning is understanding form, while realization is understanding the undifferentiated continuity, articulating all forms. This was called the unitas by Ficino in the Renaissance. He got the terms unitas, uh, after he translated Plotinus into Latin, Plotinus used the terms um, meaning the one realization directs the mind to the one. Whereas meaning directs the mind to form. Note that the projection mentally made and feelingly registered. You have to think of them now, uh, as a double layer. Uh, mentally made and feelingly registered. Note that the projection that there is a secret form behind appearance is defective. This is a projection of the ego mind that there is a secret form behind appearance. The error is the parallel fallacy. Which supposes that transcendental understanding. Is based upon form. Superior form, of course. Paralleling then the material world. This is psychism. This is derisive to the nomadic coherence.

Expressive form has an articulation complementing meaning. Expressive form has an articulation which complements meaning, and this is realization, and realization is becoming aware of the continuity, not the paralleling of a formal structure in a higher form, but of the continuity which allows for this form to manifest itself at all. This, of course, to the naive mind, is seen to be mystifying, but to the realized mind it is seen as mystical. To the ignorant mind it seemed to be ambiguous, and to the realized mind it seemed to be paradoxical. Paradoxical. Remember last week we talked a little bit about the Greek terms paradox. In Greek, doxa means opinion. The Greek terms paradox means beyond opinion. It's no longer subject to opinion that it is real. Paradox. In the Mahayana it would have been styled shunyata shunyata emptiness that, uh, emptiness and thus ness occur together. Shunyata and tathata occur together. They're indissoluble. They are undifferentiated to realization. The notion of inner meaning is thus misleading. The whole notion of inner meaning is misleading. Inner what outer meaning is meaning understanding form. But the notion of an inner meaning is the mirror fallacy. It's related to the parallel fallacy that there's some transcendental form here. The mirror fallacy is there's some inner form, and of course you can have combinations of them. It's all mental fallacy because realization is a recognition, a recognizing of the unity of the one that there is no form, there's no differentiation of it.

So that the traditional saying was that spirit and nature are one. And as Jesus taught, life and death are one. There's no such thing as a difference between them. There is no threshold. It is purely a mental fiction that such a threshold would exist. Where can it exist? Only in the deluded mind of man? There is no such thing as a heaven and a hell. These are mental delusions. But it takes a transformation of man, a metanoia to remove the differentiates, to discover, as it were, the kingdom of God. So opposing or contrasting a secret inner meaning to a mundane outer meaning is a metaphysical ploy. Ego projected and psychism in its axiomatic imperium. It's by this journey that the spirit is divorced from nature by definition. Now, this is exactly what happened. And curiously enough, it happened very meticulously to the Greek mind. And it happened to the Greek mind before it got to Rome, before it got into contact with Judaism, that this whole confusion happened to the Greek mind roughly between Aristotle and Posidonius, roughly between around um 343, 50 BC and about 150 BC. And those 200 years the Greek mind fell into this mirror fallacy, fell into this parallel fallacy, and, trying to resolve itself, developed the doctrine known in antiquity as stoic physics. And it was stoic physics that was the basis upon which the metaphysical speculation of Hellenistic Judaism and Greco romanizing, when they were braided together and agglomerated together in this white hot amalgam around the turn of the millennium, 2000 years ago, that they fell into.

And it is absolutely no wonder that when the theological transformation of the Christian doctrine happened in the 13th century under Thomas Aquinas, that they went back to Aristotle to use that as the grid upon which to restructure it, because it was the grid that had been used in the first place, and the one man who was able to criticize it intellectually, who understood what was going on. Was Roger bacon, and they silenced him like they silenced most competition. They threw him in prison. They refused to let anyone talk to him. They refused to have any of his books published. And they still are not published 700 years later. And the next man to understand this whole confusion was Leibniz, and his works are still largely untranslated. 90% of Leibniz's work is still locked up in manuscripts in royal private libraries in Europe. You can't go near them. The person who let the cat out of the bag was Benjamin Franklin. He's the one who says all of this theological dickering is beside the point. A human being can grow, a human being can mature. And if he will just continue to mature, there comes a point where he transforms, where his growth is no longer according to the graph. He doesn't just grow another inch, he doesn't just grow with another idea that there comes a point where he transforms and he realizes that his vision becomes full.

He becomes a pneumatic man and not a Helvetic man. Not a psychic man, but a pneumatic man, a spiritual being, and the spiritual man. Wherever he looks, he looks with understanding. The longer he looks, the more he understands, because he recognizes. And in this recognition reads out from the world, reads out from himself, reads out from what happens. Nature is an open book to that person. Whatever he wishes to know, he knows by looking and understanding. This is the eye of vision. This is the universe. This was the message that was delivered by Jesus. And almost immediately fell into these machinations. All of this is very difficult to follow, except that we have another guide to this whole era, and that guide is Philo of Alexandria. Because Philo was born before Jesus, Philo lived after Jesus so that his life spans the entire exact transformational period. He was born about 25 BC and died about 50 A.D. and we have a lot of his writings. We have 13 volumes of his writings. And Philo is the beginning of a whole movement of understanding, because he is the one who brings into play the notion that the transformative seed within man is the word, the logos, because it is a language seed. It is expressive, symbolic language seed which transforms the mind.

And that that understanding was something that Philo did not have as a young man did not have from his usual education, though it was very good. Philo came from one of the richest families in Alexandria. Philo's brother was named Alexander. Philo's brother is the man who bankrolled Herod Agrippa, who was the ultimate Roman judge for Paul in Jerusalem. Or I guess they took him to the coast. They took him to, uh, to, uh, Haifa. Paul was tried in Haifa when he said, I have a right to be heard by the Emperor. It was Herod Agrippa, the grandson of Herod the Great, who was the judge in the case who allowed Paul to go. And he, his patron, was the brother of Philo and Philo's nephew. One of his two nephews was the prefect of Judea. At the time that all this was happening, Philo's family was right in the center of the whole transformation. Now we need another fact in here. And then we'll we'll call it quits for the night. Alexandria as a city had more Jews than the entire population of Judea. There were more Jews in the city than anywhere else in the total ancient world. Philo estimates that about a million Jews in Alexandria. Just by head count. Alexander was more important than the rest of the Jewish world combined. That Jerusalem was important only because it was the site of the temple, and the temple had become symbolic of the Maccabean type of perverted Judaism.

And in fact, after the destruction of the temple in 70 AD, there never again was a temple. Judaism. It changed its nature. It became Rabbinic Judaism based on the book. Based on the Targums, the commentaries on the law and the rabbinic Judaism is based upon a book which cannot be changed. Every iota, every inflection, every letter, must be exactly the way that it was before. This is like moving into an ultimate, uh, rigidity, so that the Gnostic elements in Judaism finally had to go into an esoteric tradition. Neo-pythagorean. And out of this comes the Kabbalah. This is a tremendous development, because we realize now that if we take a good, close look at Philo, and we realize that Philo didn't think in these ways until he was nearly 40, 50 years of age. It wasn't until he was a mature man that he even began to think about these things, that we ask the question, how old was Jesus when Philo started getting interested in these things? And where was Jesus father was born about 25 A.D. he started getting interested around 20. He was born 25 BC. He started getting interested around 20 A.D. Jesus was born in four BC. He was about 24 years old. Do you think that he was sawing wood in Galilee? Not likely. Not likely at all. So we have to take a real, real close look at Philo's works.

Not to read what Philo is saying so much, but to use his own allegorical method to try and see, especially when it comes to his history of the Law of Moses and his, uh, portrayal of the contemplative life. We will see something in Philo which no Jew would have ever put in a consciousness, that there is a transformative capacity in human nature, that you have to step outside of the law to manifest it. And the only reason why you should be so, uh, peculiarly acquainted with the law is to know at what point you have stepped outside of it and transformed. And it's like somebody observed late in antiquity, either Philo Platonists or Plato Philosophizes. But when you look at the platonic elements in Philo, you don't find Plato. You don't even find what's called the Middle Platonism of the late transformed Academy. You find a kind of Platonism, which is styled as Neoplatonism, something that doesn't manifest until Plotinus's time, 300 years down the line, 200 years down the line. Where did he get this? He sure didn't get it from any teachers in Alexandria as good as they were. He sure didn't get it from the Jewish tradition, but he got it from somebody. He got it from some masterful teacher who said, this is the way you do it. And when you do it this way, you don't ever have to go back. Well, we'll go on next week and see where we can get to.

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