Paul, Philo, and Cicero

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Ancient Rome: Rome, Essenes, Alexandria, and the Book of Enoch
Presentation 35 of 54

Paul, Philo, and Cicero
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, August 13, 1985

Transcript:

The lecture which follows was delivered by Roger Ware at the Whirling Rainbow School on Tuesday, August 13th, 1985. The title is Philo, Paul and Cicero. We've been trying to understand for a long time the role that Alexandria played. In the most crucial transformation that has yet taken place on this planet. It's difficult to appreciate the tremendous change that happened about 2000 years ago. Part of the difficulty of appreciating it is the way in which mythological slurs have forbade us to appreciate the delicacy and the profundity of the actual change. Just as a rule of thumb. The change in structure was the change from picking up traditions and holding them together, much as one would by handful, and learning that those traditions were each thread's integral in and of themselves, and that it was a disservice to just gather them up. But that one could take all those threads and could weave them together and make a universal pattern of consciousness. And this was different. It took a long time to appreciate the far reaching dimensions of that change, and we have seen that as early as about 180 BC. There was already a sensitivity, not an awareness, but a sensitivity, much like a tooth long before it hurts, becomes sensitive to hot or cold. And all during the second century BC, this sensitivity increased itself so that by around 100 BC there were already small groups in many different traditions who were excerpting themselves from the common life of the time. When we say the common life of the time, we don't mean that it was integrated, but rather the mundane aspects of life.

One of these communities, which we looked at very strongly for a long time, was a community outside of Jerusalem, in the wilderness. Jerusalem, up about 2200ft above sea level in this community, about 3500ft below it, which was where the Jordan River ran into the Dead Sea, which would become eventually identified in our times as Qumran initiated itself around 100 BC. The trigger that allowed for this community to achieve its power of integration was a document known as the Testaments of the 12 Patriarchs. And in the Testaments of the 12 Patriarchs, the separate characteristics that each of the 12 tribes of Jerusalem had been endowed with were brought together and arranged in a pattern, and it was this pattern of wholeness that was addressed by the Essien community. Come in please. There's a seat over here, a nice, comfortable one, and there are seats scattered around. We're talking about how the traditions which had been gathered in the BC times were changed, that they were no longer seen as just separate threads which could be collected together. In fact, the image of the grasped hand for grasping was the image that, um, Zeno of Citium, the first great stoic, used. Zeno, of course, the first of the great long lineage of Stoics was actually a Phoenician, not from Phoenicia, but. But from Cyprus, and he was a Semitic individual and extremely capable of arguing and hairsplitting, extremely capable of intellectual attainments. And when Zeno went to Athens in the middle of the fourth century BC, he heard all of the teachers who were there at this time.

Plato had been dead for about 30 years, but, um, Aristotle's, uh, Lyceum was still operating. The Academy was still there, and after hearing everyone, Zeno initiated the stoic philosophy which said that a man's mind could conceive of equally cogent arguments on either side of any issue. That man's mind was balanced in this peculiar way, that this stalemate of mental agility left the decision in the hands of material reality to command what must be. And a kind of materialistic determinism came in, and Zeno used to clench his fist to say, this is how we grasp reality. We train the mind to be clever and insightful on both sides of the issue, and then we look to the experience of the material world to confirm for us the truth of the matter. The Asean community on the shore of the Dead Sea, within a mile of the Jordan affluence, had based itself upon a coming together of all of the characteristics of the 12 tribes. Each of the 12 tribes were given a particular sensibility to develop. And we've talked about how in the second century BC, man became sensible to some imminent change of structure, and around 100 BC the sensibility quickened and deepened into an awareness. It was not yet conscious, but it was aware, and the traditions of the 12 tribes were brought together in the Testament of the 12 Patriarchs and made into a form rather like a ring, rather like a circle.

The Testaments of the 12 Tribes was to become the template upon which early Christian liturgy was based. The Didache, the 12 patriarchs, would take this up near the end of the first century AD, and it's curious again to note what we have seen so often in our pattern. There's almost a symmetry that the testaments of the 12 patriarchs should be 100 BC and the Didache 100 AD, that the image which we saw again and again, and the book of Daniel, of the white, wool haired, red eyed, bronzed figure who can walk in flame, occurs also in the apocalypse attributed to Saint John. And we've come in, uh, on how psychic fact reverberates and occurs both in the past and in the future, that the present occurrence of it is so profound sometimes that it distorts the separations of past and future and present. It becomes a non temporal event, and that very often only in the large scale contemplation of reality can one see these parentheses of events, and one begins hermetically to note that when one finds these parentheses, that there is something in the center which has occurred, which has caused this. And we can see from this that somewhere around one AD zero AD zero BC was a profound psychic event. And we say psychic now we should amend. This. We have taught ourselves to use the terms spiritual, but we're making a we're making a colloquial, a point at this time.

The Qumran community held, in its estimation, the idea that there was a temporal pattern which was unfolding itself according to prophecy, and that this unfoldment, according to prophecy, had a definite, um, movement rather like a sine wave, and that there were certain times when it was very conspicuous, and there were times when it was invisible, and the frequency of the visible and the invisible kept mounting towards a disclosure point. And by the computation of the Asean communities, they came very close to estimating the exact time of the arrival of the prophetic event. It came out to around four BC in our, um, chronology, which is just about the time of the Star of Bethlehem. Let's pause for a second. Make yourselves comfortable, people. We're talking tonight about Philo and Paul and Cicero. We're talking about these three because these three form a triangle, not a triad, but a triangle. Philo is a Hellenistic Jew. He brings Judaism and Greek thought together. Paul brings Roman thought and Greek thought together. By thought. We're speaking of experience here. We need Cicero because he brings Greek and Roman thought together this way, with the three of them we have a very interesting triangle. I say triangle because it's a geometric form. It's the first form of stability. All three of these individuals were influenced by a single mastermind, who is almost unknown to history in any detail.

And that person's name was Posidonius. And Posidonius was the greatest of all the Stoics. If stoicism had been left in the hands of individuals like Zeno, there would have been no books at all. Zeno loved to walk on the stoa in Athens with the painted porticos. He was good at arguing, and he used to be very pushy. Diogenes. Laertes says that once he said to someone, do you see the speaker stand that I threw off the stoa yesterday? If you don't get out of my way, you'll join it over there on the other end of the stone. So Zeno was very pushy. His disciple Chrysippus is the first one to write down any of the stoic doctrines, and he wrote, according to the estimate in antiquity, 400 books. And Chrysippus, at the end of 400 books, summarized his puzzlement in saying, none of us were ever quite sure what our master meant. We didn't know what Zeno was really thinking because Zeno was so good at balancing everything. There were equal arguments, pro or con anything. In fact, if we look at stoicism, we find a miraculous affinity elsewhere in the world's scriptures. About the same time, somewhat a little later. The Bhagavad Gita has a tremendous sympathetic structure with early stoicism. And in fact, the development of Stoicism in Posidonius is very, very close to the development that thought in India underwent at this time. But Posidonius is very interesting. All of his books were destroyed.

We have nothing except scraps. But the curious thing is that every major writer that we run across mentions Posidonius. And when we come to Philo and Paul and Cicero, he is the masterful presence, the masterful intellect behind the order of their worlds. It's difficult to find anything on him. If we go to the Oxford English Dictionary, they tell us that Posidonius was born somewhere around 135 BC and died somewhere around 50 BC. That he was born in Apamea on the Orontes River. Now Apamea is in what is today Syria, and Apamea was the end of the caravan route coming from India. In fact, Apamea was the ancient Semitic fortress that was first established about 2300 BC by Sargon Sargon the Great, who established the notion of a fertile crescent, and that the far western point of the Fertile Crescent was at Apamea. The reason was is Apamea is in a big, huge, beautiful valley, and one can keep horses quartered there by the hundreds or camels one can bivouac a whole caravan or many dozens of caravans. And on the other end of the Fertile Crescent is the, uh, ports along the Persian Gulf. So Posidonius is born at this most sensitive time in Apamea, and he also went to Athens. And so often we see now in this time period that non-greeks go to school their minds in Greek thought, but that they themselves in their lifestyle, are not Greek. Posidonius is such a character, and later on we will see that Paul is also such a character.

Philo is such a character. Marcion is such a character. They are Non-greeks who school their mind in Greek thought, but whose life experience overlaps. It goes outside these frames of reference, so that they have a problem of fitting in what they experience as a human being into what they know is a mature individual. Or conversely, and it's the same problem in reverse of applying what they know intellectually to lives that don't quite measure up, they don't quite coincide. And this is the problem that Paul has. This is the problem that Philo has. And this is the problem that Cicero has. And Posidonius was the first really great mind who faced this problem in the classical world. He is the one who organized stoic thought into a profound world system. He is the first one to build an intellectual cosmology that, in one form or another, has come down to us today. The Oxford Dictionary tells us that eventually he settled down on the island of Rhodes. And of course, there at Rhodes he was extraordinarily famous of anyone who was anyone passing anywhere near. Rhodes stopped to visit Posidonius. People like Pompeii. He was, in fact a great patron of Posidonius. In 78 BC, Cicero attended the School of Posidonius, to whom he pays tribute in his writings. So Cicero, at the age of about 28, when a man is really becoming mature, when his feeling tones deepen and he can no longer just toy with ideas, but now he has to live them because the, uh, energy is rising within him.

Studied under Posidonius. He was, in fact, the author of a tremendous chronology of past times called The Histories. Posidonius was the first historian of ideas, as we would call them today, and his history, of which we have almost nothing, was a complete survey of the pattern of human life, and because he had surveyed it all, he could see these movements. And Posidonius is the very first individual who had the idea that there was an eternal fabric underneath man's experience, which was slowly conditioning man to consciousness, that the whole of human nature was a single history, and that any individual histories were but filaments that were being developed to go to enrich this eventual tapestry. It was Posidonius who pointed out that the Pillars of Hercules, the Gibraltar Pass, was on the same latitude as the farthest known point in India, and that about midway on this point was Athens, and that the Earth was a sphere. That, in fact, the sphere had been computed in its extent by Eratosthenes, quite accurately, incidentally, within 50 miles of the true dimension. This was about 150 years before Posidonius, and by taking the distance between Gibraltar and that point in India, Posidonius came out with a notion that this was but a small section of the sphere of the Earth, and that by taking the latitudes north and south of this, one could go north just so far, and then the tundra would be there, and one could go south just so far, and then the desert would be there.

He computed that the Roman world was just a fraction of the earth, and that in fact there was, as the Pythagorean theory had said, a Counter-Earth, but that it was not on the other side of the sun, but it was an autochthonous world on the other side of the planet in the southern hemisphere, but opposite it. And so Posidonius was the first to posit that man can only gain a universal perspective by turning away from the earth and turning to the stars. That it was the celestial patterns that actually showed the true dimension. He also was the one who wrote that Roman imperialism, which had brought civilized people together and had brought them together for the sake of their own improvement, was a practical illustration of the doctrine of continual communion and mutual sympathy between the world of God and the world of man. That there was a sympathy. The Stoics were very big on this, that all the hierarchies of reality are sympathetic to each other, and that occasionally there is an individual who sounds the chord so that all of the levels achieve a harmony, a harmonia, and that it is the great individual who man but godlike sounds. This chord of unity changes history into a new mode. And so the stoic Posidonius by 50 BC, had prepared the stoic mind to accept a God man who would change the chord of reality, who would hum all the hierarchies together.

And there would be a new epoch. Uh, the word uh, epoch, um, in Greek uh, means making something actual. An epoch has that practical tone, but the tone is that the whole, um, cast of reality becomes something new. An epoch is something which is made new epoch, so that political virtue. And this is very important. Political virtue does not simply happen in ambiguous vicissitudes, but has a moral lesson behind it all, and is directed, and that this direction can be sensed and known through an occult divination talent among certain individuals. Now this becomes extraordinarily powerful when we think that Cicero, what he realized that he was doomed, he realized about two years before he was assassinated that it was an inevitable event. It was an extremely courageous man. And when he realized that he was going to be killed, he tried his best in a Macedonian way to pull everything together that he could in his life and in his teachings and in his capacity. And he moved himself from his villa to a country estate, which was within walking distance of the Cumaean Sibyl. He went down to the Bay of Naples, and it was there that Cicero wrote his last works. He wrote six books of philosophy within the last two years in his work. The greatest of those volumes, as we have talked about, was De Republica.

And it was based upon Plato, Plato's Republic. But this was Cicero's amplification of Plato's Republic. This comes several centuries later in time, 300 years later. In time. It has the cosmological development of the stoic genius of Posidonius behind it, and in this one is no longer concerned with making a Greek polis, but one is concerned with making the city of man man as a whole, mankind as a whole, but that the model for the city of mankind as a whole cannot be any human tradition. It must be the celestial integration of all traditions. This is different. It's not just an enlargement arithmetically, but it's a change in the geometric structure. Now, we would not have Cicero's De Republica at all. We didn't have it in history from around the fourth century up until the 19th century. But someone found that some homilies, I think of Augustine, were written on some used Greek papyrus, and when they turned it over, parted the papyrus folds and turned it over. There was Cicero's De Republica. This was found in the Vatican Library in 1820. Almost all of de Republica was rescued at this time. What was missing from it was the final book, the sixth book, but oddly enough, it was an excerpt of the sixth book, which was the only element that survived through written history for about 1400 years. And that book was called The Dream of Scipio, or as the Romans would say, Scipio.

There is a translation of the Dream of Scipio and the studies in the Hermetic Tradition. It originally was published as volume five of the Collectanea Hermetica series in 1894. That was when Westcott's series, and translated in 1983 here and published by The Aquarian Press, with a foreword by Robert Temple, who wrote the book on the Sirius mystery. The Dream of Scipio is a presentation of Posidonius's great intellectual cosmic vision, and in it Cicero brings forward to us, in the form of a convoluted presentation, a the most mysterious way in which reality is given over to us at the end of Plato's Republic is the vision of air. Air is the man who has died and who has come back to life, and who can tell us about the other world. He has been there, but in the dream of Scipio it is not so much an after death experience, but it isn't the form of a dream, and it is a dream which the adopted grandson of Scipio Africanus has of his grandfather, and the younger Scipio dreams of his grandfather, who was a very mysterious personage. He was the greatest Roman general. He was the one who beat Hannibal, but he was also a mystical priest of the of the mysteries. It's not redundant. And his best friend was King Masinissa of Numidia in northern Africa, and the grandson had been visiting the elderly Masinissa. And that night, in his dream, his grandfather came to him with an explanation of the order of the world.

Now the younger Scipio would have lived on into the time of Posidonius. It is Cicero who is writing this, so we not only have a dream of something happening from someone who had long been dead, but it's someone telling us that several hundred years later, so that Cicero is putting together several different time frames into a kind of a structure which we recognize as Pythagorean now, but also one which is stoic in its presentational mode. And in here he gives us a vision of the harmony of reality. We would recognize the later rendition. Of the Dream of Scipio. It's usually called the Ptolemaic universe from Ptolemy of the third century AD. Well, Cicero wrote it 350 years before Ptolemy did. The arrangement of reality by planetary levels going out to the fixed stars. The notion that man's soul is mutable and moves through these hierarchies. That by reaching the ninth level, man achieves re achieves his maturity. I continued to gaze steadfastly. Africanus, continuing, said, how long will your mind remain riveted to the earth? Do you not behold how glorious a temple that you are! Do you know that the universe consists of nine circles, or rather spheres, all connected together, one of which is celestial and the furthest off embracing all the rest, the supreme deity, preserving and governing the others. And this would become the archetype to become the archetypal expression that what can be said is a nine level hierarchy of reality, but that the controlling context, which cannot be counted with it, is another.

It would be a 10th level, except that one mysteriously has to write ten unity plus zero, so that one cannot include it within the count and its efficaciousness comes because it cannot be counted in the structure. The watershed of mentality in the transformation period that we are looking at now will be those who could believe that that is so. But could not live it. Those who could not believe that it was so and tried to live it and could not, and those that realized that it was necessarily so, regardless of whether you could believe it or not. And so the transformation split man's consciousness into three different vectors at the same time. It wasn't a transformation of one world, the old world, into a new world, but it was rather like a diamond hitting a point and splitting into three. Philo. Paul and Cicero set up these patterns and these resonances for that split. Philo will produce Rabbinic Judaism. Finally, Paul will produce church Christianity and oddly enough, it is Cicero who will produce the Gnostic Hermetic tradition. It's an incredible happening and one can hardly believe it. I ran across for the first time in a little book here. These were lectures delivered at Oxford University in England in 1913. Stoics and Skeptics by Edward Bevan, who was a very famous scholar of that time.

He has a very interesting statement here, one which I think we mentioned the last two weeks. He writes about 350 years before Paul of Tarsus passed through Athens, another Semitic teacher coming from a country close to Cilicia, from Cyprus, and from a city which, like Tarsus, was an old Oriental city penetrated by Hellenism, had gone about among the people of Athens as clever and inquisitive in that age as in the days of Paul, and had declared to them that the deity was one power pervading the universe, and dwelling in all men everywhere without distinction of race, and that in the ideal city there would be no temples, because no temple, the work of builders and artificers could be worthy of God. It is a remarkable case of history repeating itself, the same background and so great similarity between the actors three and a half centuries apart. Paul, of course, is from Tarsus, which is just across the Mediterranean from Cyprus, less than 100 miles. Of course, the resemblance between Zeno, the Hellenizing, Phoenician and Paul, the Hellenized Hebrew of Tarsus, is not purely accidental. The author of the acts is assuredly put into the mouth of his Paul with deliberate purpose, phrases characteristic of the teaching which went back to Zeno. Nor is the connection made by the writer an arbitrary one. It is an index to the great fact, the actual connection in history between Stoicism and Christianity. Looking back, we can see more fully than was possible at the moment when the acts were written.

That's the book of acts in the New Testament. To what extent the stoic teaching had prepared the ground in the Mediterranean lands for the Christian, and what large elements of the stoic tradition were destined to be taken up into Christianity. The difficulty with going to Cicero is that we are blind. We are prejudiced. Our minds, our mentalities, have been polarized either towards the Jewish or the Christian view, and we have a difficult time just seeing the obvious. What is the obvious? What is the obvious? The obvious is, is that when we pick up the Bible, we are picking up both the Old Testament and the New Testament together. They are both in the very same book. They have always been in the same book. There is not one single vestige in here of the third tradition. There's nothing in here. There's nothing Gnostic or hermetic in here. There's nothing Neoplatonic in here. It's not there. This polarity is reminiscent. This kind of polarizing mentality comes out when someone is seized by the collective unconscious. When an archetype grabs someone. There is this kind of a opposition, polarized and enforced. The more mature affiliation of a spectrum of possibilities is foregone. It's very difficult unless we turn to Philo, because Philo gives us, at long last, the real key to understanding all of this. We eventually have to go to Alexandria for our truth. We talked last time about Philo's view of Moses, of Moses as a mystical man, and we note that when we look at Paul say letters to the Galatian church, he always harkens back to Abraham.

He does not hearken back to Moses. He always goes back to the origin of the laws are not first given to Moses, but is a covenant given to Abraham, and is the covenant which with Abraham which is the beginning, the fount, if you will, of the law, that as far as Paul is concerned, Moses is an interpreter of the law, but that the law begins with the covenant from Abraham. Therefore, that all the development of the law is contingent upon that covenant, and that Jesus is the last person in that covenant. And because of the nature of his sacrifice, the covenant becomes then a personal property of the Christ. So that in Paul's terms. The only way to to merge and join. With Christ is through the church. His famous phrase that the church is the Bride of Christ. It is only by joining and maintaining oneself in the church through faith that one can achieve this deliverance, this salvation, and that that is so because of the conditions of the law as inherited and passed down from Abraham. Philo sees this differently. Philo, in a treatise entitled Why Certain Names in the Holy Scriptures are Changed. He begins with pointing out that Abraham, when he was 90 and nine, the Lord appeared unto Abraham, and said, I am thy God.

And of course, Philo goes in right away to the number symbolism. He talks about how nine added to 90 that these are images of fulfillment, and that the number 100, which would be the years that Abraham was when the son was actually born, is the number of perfection. That 100 is the symbol of perfection, and the number ten is the symbol of improvement. And he writes here. But do not think. But but do not thou think that this appearance presented itself to the eyes of the body? He's talking about Abraham seeing the Lord of the universe who appeared before him and said, I am thy God. He says, this is not the physical eyes that are seeing this. This appearance did not present itself to the eyes of the body, for they see no things, but such as are perceptible to the outward senses. And that a very mysterious phrase in Philo. There is nowhere in the Jewish tradition that this phrase comes from. It first appears in Philo. It is in fact an indication of contact with India. For Philo writes, talking now about the outward senses, but those objects of the outward senses are compound ones full of destruction. But the deity is not a compound object and is indestructible. It's true that the phrase was hear, O Israel, the Lord thy God is one, but is quite different to say that the world of the senses are compound and are destructible.

If we go back just to the wisdom of Solomon, just a few years before this, the wisdom of Solomon, written in the same place in Alexandria, uses gorgeous language about the sensate world to describe the beauties of Sophia. And here's Philo saying the sensate world is compound and therefore all destructible, all composite things are perishable. One recognizes this from the Dhammapada, but the eye which receives the impression of the divine appearance of the eye of the soul. And Philo now is introducing this for the very first time. He is taking this from Posidonius in a philonic way. It's not so much that Philo Platonism, but that Philo modernizes. But the eye which receives the impression of the divine appearance of the eye of the soul. For besides this, those things which it is, only the eyes of the body that see are only seen by them because they take light as a coadjutor. And light is different, both for the object seen and from the things which see it. But all these things which the soul sees of itself, and through its own power, it sees without the cooperation of anything or anyone else. No moving parts. It's more profound than that. It's that there are no moving parts anywhere in the whole act. The seeing of the soul is not a motion. There is no difference between the soul seeing and God seeing. Was one of the arch key points of Posidonius philosophy, and later on will become the bedrock upon which Plotinus will base his notion of the one that the 10th has no movement whatsoever, and is not in the hierarchy of becoming because it has, and they use the Greek terms here.

Ousia being, being. Usha. Usha. But Philo was the first one to bring this out and make the statement and apply the stoic cosmology in just this way. But he's doing it writing about the Old Testament. This is why the Jewish tradition becomes so absolutely charismatic at this time was because the change of the consciousness and the language in the application was first applied effectively here in Alexandria by Philo. This is very powerful writing, extremely powerful. It's so powerful that it almost bypasses us today because it is of what, what we would call a familiar everyday intelligence to us. It doesn't occur to us how different this is because we think very much in this way, naturally. So we think for the mind applying, its never closing and never slumbering eye to their doctrines and speculations, sees them by no spurious light, but by that genuine light which shines forth from itself. When therefore you hear that God has been seen by man, you must consider that this is said without any reference to that light which is perceptible by the external senses. For it is natural that that which is appreciable only by the intellect should be presented to the intellect alone. It won't be for a thousand years that will occur to anyone to prove that God exists, that belongs to a different civilization.

They will be only concerned to prove that God is true. His existence is taken for granted. It is not problematical at this point in history, not for anyone. There was no one for whom that was a problematical. And some much later thousand years later. It is natural. Notice now that it's in the natural world. It is natural that that which is appreciable only by the intellect should be presented to the intellect alone. And the fountain of the purest light is God's, so that when God appears to the soul, he pours forth his beams without any shade, and beaming with the most radiant brilliancy. And then follow, bringing the other hand in to balance. It writes. Do not, however, think that the living God, as he who is truly living, is ever seen so as to be comprehended by any human being never seen. For we have no power in ourselves to see anything by which we may be able to conceive any adequate notion of him. We have no external sense suited to that purpose, for he is not an object which can be discerned by an outward sense. This becomes very, very, very, very touching. God is not an object. The divine is not objective, or rather is the only object, is the only objective, and therefore is not distinguishable from anything else. The Stoics took this eminence of saying that God was nature, that there was no way to split or dissolve the divine from nature.

But Philo makes the distinction, not the separation, but the distinction. He says, we can see nature, but we cannot apprehend God except in a very peculiar way. And this is how he says it. We do not have any strength adequate to it. Therefore, Moses, the spectator of the invisible nature, the man who really saw God. And this is where Philo comes back to Moses. Paul will never go to Moses, but Philo does. And he says, But Moses, the spectator of the invisible nature, the man who really saw God for the sacred Scripture says that he entered into the darkness, by which expression they mean figuratively to intimate the invisible essence, having investigated every part of everything, sought to see clearly the much desired and only God. But when he found nothing, not even any appearance at all resembling what he had hoped to behold, he then gave up all idea of receiving instruction on that point from any other source. And this is the point that Judaism will maintain its fine to be educated, and one can become very learned is absolutely not usable when it comes to the divine. It doesn't matter how synchronistic it is, it doesn't matter how sophisticated a pattern of apprehension one has. It does not apply. It's ineffective. Father writes, Moses found nothing, not even any appearance at all resembling what he had hoped to behold.

So he gave up the idea of receiving instruction on that point from any other source flies to the very being himself whom he was seeking, and entreats him, saying, show me thyself, that I may see so as to know thee. But nevertheless he fails to obtain the end which he had proposed to himself, and which he had accounted the most all sufficient gift for the most excellent race of creation, mankind, namely, a knowledge of those bodies and things which are below the living God. For it is said unto him, thou shalt see my back parts, but my face shall not be beheld by thee, so that nature, the hierarchies of the cosmos, are the back parts of God, not the face. The face is forever unseeable it is just this point, just this issue that the Essenes took umbrage with, saying, this is all very well and it's all very true according to the law, but that there is a possibility here which is not been discussed and could not have been discussed because it could not have been engendered until our time. And we are now engendering a new form to see the face of God. Because it is true that for any single human being, no matter how talented, no matter how, uh, energized by circumstance. It is the limitations of the individual, and therefore we will not base ourselves upon the individual. We will base ourselves on a different form of apprehension, and our form of apprehension will be the form of the mystical community, because it is the gestalt of the mystical community which can behold the face of the divine.

For the limitations that were pointed out according to the law do indeed apply for individuals, but do not apply for the community of purity. For in the community of purity, it is the interpenetration of selves, the willingness to give oneself up for the others, so that the community of the pure is selfless and is the selfless community which will behold the face of the divine. The no self of the purified community is essential and has never been done before. Now this poses a real problem because in the first century BC, the development of the Asean community with the rigid rules for purity, which now you can realize what they were doing, they were trying, like mathematical nuclear physicists, to build the selfless community based on absolute purity, no self community, community yogis, a community yoga. But the idea that kept coming in waves and realizations from the outside was that mankind was a whole. And the idea kept cropping up in Alexandria about this time. What if all mankind were a selfless community of one? Then we would behold the face of the divine, not just in a small group of 20 or 30 or 200 or even 500 individuals abstracted from life out on wilderness conditions. But to build the ecumenical population of a single world and behold the divine as a unified mankind, this became an incredible amplification of that goal.

But it set insoluble problems. It was all that they could do to get 200 people to a state of relative purity. 2000 years ago, it absolutely boggled the mind, but the idea was never lost. And in fact, the idea received an incredible push because Jesus taught that it was almost impossible for man in his natural ignorance to attain to this community, but that when man was spiritually transformed, he could do it with effortless ease, and that the key was not engineering some vast, intricate empire to condition man, but to change individuals so that they could do it effortlessly. And this came right in the middle of Philo and Paul and Cicero, and pulled the rug out from under all three of them, because it was just unbelievable. And no one wanted to really experience this very, very few because it was a transformation. It was a radical restructuring of the whole element, which had just recently received a sophistication brand new cosmologies, shiny, just starting to work. And this guy says, give it all up. Not only give it all up, but that all of it is irrelevant that it has. It has no traction whatsoever. That not only is the mind stymieing itself by these false problem, but it is exactly this mind which needs to be transformed that in fact, one of the conditions of its neurotic madness is that it constantly makes these structures.

It constantly looks towards hierarchies. And so Jesus drew no diagrams at all. We don't need diagrams. We don't need the polarities. In The Secret Gospel of Mark, the woman is berating him for coming too late because the man is dead. He says, what death? Where is death? And he walks into the tomb and reaches forward and pulls him out with. The owl. What? Death. Where is this polarity of life and death? Where is this polarity? In what world does this obtain? Not here. The question was not having faith in the church structure one way or another, but having the experience, the knowledge of transformation which made churches of any structure superfluous, which made traditions of any structure superfluous. You don't have to queue up in line waiting for the experts. They can't sell it to you. They can't teach it to you. You can do it. And here's the way. It's almost like the flame gets lost in the shuffle. It's almost like the flame just mysteriously transposes itself. And these huge empire structures come in to gloss it over. The Roman Empire is made. The Christian Church is made. Rabbinical Judaism is made, all kinds of structures are made. But the mystical flame of the realization that a transformed human being is out of this picture, out of this frame of reference, is free, is liberated. This was like the tinkling of a little bell that could not somehow be worked in and could not be forgotten, and it would take a long time, a long time before people came to terms with this.

It'll take us another 3 or 4 lectures to go deeper into Philo, which we're going to do. The next thing of Philo that we're going to look at is on the contemplative life, the virtues of the suppliants, which is on the Essenes and Philo, gives us very good information on this. And the second thing we need to look at is the allegories of the sacred laws, after the work of the six days of creation. The one gives us information, the other gives us a method. Philo's allegorical method will become a way of training the intellect to see multi-dimensional, because when the intellect is able to see in a multi-dimensional way, what is born is the sense that in between the lines meaning is free floating. And if one can acclimate oneself not to the interpretation of any allegorical stance, but acclimate oneself to meaningfulness which is free floating between the lines, one conditions the mind to perceive non objectively wholeness. And this will be the technique which they will use in Alexandria. This will be the technique that will finally flourish in the Secret Wisdom schools of Alexandria, for training oneself so that the Hermetic treatises like the Poimandres begin with I raised my mind and I become vast spaces. Well, let's stop there and eat up all the hamburgers that we have in the house. Yeah. That's great.

Is this the one you were reading from?

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