Philo and Therapeutae

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Ancient Rome: Rome, Essenes, Alexandria, and the Book of Enoch Presentation 27 of 54 Philo and Therapeutae Presented by Roger Weir Tuesday, September 3, 1985 Transcript: Lecture that follows was delivered at the Whirling Rainbow School on Tuesday, September the 3rd, 1985 by Roger Weir. It is entitled Philo and a Therapeutae. Let's start with the first contradiction in Luke in the gospel according to Luke. The gospel tells us. That after Jesus was born, he was taken into the temple. He was circumcised on the eighth day, according to Jewish law and also according to Jewish law. All of this is in Deuteronomy. His mother had to go to the temple to be purified the after birth, and because of blood and so forth, she had to go and be purified. So Luke says that when the day came for them to be purified is laid down by the law of Moses, they took him up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord. And according to Luke, there are two individuals who saw them in the temple, Simeon and Anna, and an old woman of 84 who constantly lived in the temple, and Simeon, a man who had said that he wished not to be laid to rest until he had seen the Messiah. And both of them praised Jesus as a baby. This is in Luke, but in the Gospel of Matthew it's contradicted exactly the opposite way, because in Matthew it says that after the birth in Bethlehem, that an angel came to Joseph in a dream and warned him that Herod had had a conference with the wise men, the three Magi who had come. And Herod was extremely jealous, because the Magi had said that the king of Israel, the future king, had been born, and they were going to see him, that he'd been born in Bethlehem. And so Herod was out to kill every child, every male child in Bethlehem, under two years of age, just to cover his bets. And in fact, we know that Herod did go insane towards the end of his reign and did, in fact, massacre the innocents in Bethlehem. Matthew says that because of this, Mary and Joseph left the very next day for Egypt. They did not go to Jerusalem. They did not stay in Israel. They did not stay in Judea. They went to Egypt. So we have two completely different stories here that they stayed in Egypt until Herod was dead. And only then did they come back. And because they learned that the successor to Herod was his vicious son, they did not go to Judea, but they traveled on a different route and went up to Galilee, which was out of the jurisdiction. So the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke directly contradict each other. Now, Luke was not an apostle. He was a third hand Christian, and Luke was the sidekick of Paul. And Luke and Paul were like this. And the Gospel of Luke is a justification for the theology of Paul. And the acts of the apostles is the second part of the Gospel of Luke, so that the Gospel of Luke and the acts of the apostles are actually promotional material for Paul. And what they promote is the founding of the structure of the Christian church. And what they tried to do for Jesus is to weave him into Jewish law. But the Gospel of Matthew, which was written first, which was in fact five separate verbatim reports from the apostles themselves. Contains the true story. And the fact is, is that going into Egypt was tantamount at this time to meaning going to Alexandria. And so we're going to follow the line that after Jesus was born as a baby, his parents took him to Alexandria. Now why Alexandria? Because his parents were Essenes. His father and his mother were very prominent in the Asean community. Mary, the mother of Jesus, was related by blood to Elizabeth, who was the mother of John the Baptist. They were sisters and they were of scenes. They were from the scene family. They were in fact from Qumran. And Mary and Elizabeth were related to that community. And the son of Elizabeth, John the Baptist would be raised there at Qumran, which is why he did his baptizing in the Jordan River, along where it ran into the Dead Sea. In Alexandria. The Asean communities had taken a different turn. And they were called Therapeutae and not Essenes. And there was a difference there. And the Alexandrian Essenes were even more ascetic. But they were not committed, like the Palestinian Acenes, to looking for a messiah. They were looking for a revelation within each individual to open up the kingdom of God, within each individual. So the Asean communities were being prepared by a teacher of righteousness in a sense of increasing purity, a sense of increasingly plotting out the esoteric mathematics of the coming incarnation of the Messiah. And we've talked about this for the last 3 or 4 months. You can review the tapes if you haven't been able to follow that point. They were computing and the time for the Messiah had come. But the Alexandrian therapeutae were different. And so, as a babe, Jesus was taken to the therapeutic communities outside of Alexandria. There were many of them, but the largest, most formidable group was north of Lake Mariota's. Alexandria had two shores. It had the Mediterranean Sea to the south, and it had a huge lake, Lake Mariota's, to the north. And Alexandria was on that spit of land in between these two bodies of water, and north of Lake Mariota's, over toward the west end, near to where um Lake Marietta swoops very close to the Mediterranean Sea. Uh, probably about two miles from the ancient Egyptian village of Rhakotis was the largest Therapeutae monastery. It is this group that is described in Philo of Alexandria's treatise on the Contemplative life. And we need to go to this to fix our sights and what we're talking about here. Philo's short book on the contemplative life was actually the fourth part of a five part sequence. Notice the five again. The Book of Matthew has five parts. The Pentateuch of Moses, Penta five. The five parts. The star, the human hand. The, uh, essential, um, quintessential quality of structure on the contemplative life was actually the second of the five parts of this work, and it included a an extensive justification of Jewish practices to the Roman emperor, the Roman emperor who first took control of Egypt. And you have to remember now that Egypt was not a Roman province belonging to the Senate and people of Rome. It was a personal possession of the Emperor. And the first one to have this as his possession was Augustus. And so the appeals were to the Emperor himself, not to anybody in the Roman Senate, not to any of the Roman, uh, hierarchy whatsoever. They went directly to the Emperor in Philo's time. The emperor changed from Augustus to Tiberius, and then from Tiberius to, um, Gaius. Caligula and Caligula, of course, is one of the most insane characters in world history. He's the one who left the Roman Empire to his horse because of the sense of foreboding among Alexandrian Jews, of being the personal possession of someone who was unstable, whose mentality was showing all the strains of the archetypal power haunted mentality which the Roman upper. The class was beginning to manifest again and again. Philo and his wealthy brother Alexander and his nephew were sent to Rome for a specific purpose. Now, the history books tell us that he was sent there to represent the Jews and the Jewish cause to the Roman Emperor. But as you will see from what I present to you tonight, that they were sent on a medical mission. They were sent to try to cure the emperor of his madness, because Philo and his brother and his nephew were also members of this therapeutic community that Jesus was taken to as a babe. And this therapeutic community outside of Alexandria, just north of Lake Mariota's, specialized in healing souls, what we would call today psychotherapy, but a psychotherapy which was extremely effective. And when he would grow up, Jesus would be a great physician in the sense he was able to cast out demons because he learned the techniques from this community. And this was the special province. They were spiritual doctors. And Philo, in his 60s, early 60s, was sent to Rome by the Jewish community in Alexandria. And probably by the whole community of Alexandria. Some 2 million people to try and cure the Emperor Caligula, to cast out his demons. Pursuant to that, Philo wrote this five part extended volume in the form of a letter to try and explain to him, to try and enlighten him as to the tremendously complex background. And one of the elements in that background, in fact, the very center of that element that the Emperor had to be enlightened to was the fact that God was invisible. That God was unknown, that there were no statues, and there were, um, no figures that could represent him or could adequately even present him. So that in his last part of this five part treatise, he explained to Caligula that his grandfather Augustus had been the first to understand that in the temple in Jerusalem there was to be no figure of Augustus of the Roman Emperor, even though he was the god of the state. And Augustus had become the god man for the Greco-Roman world. He was divine on the precedent of Julius Caesar, who was the first Roman to become divine. So that all the succeeding emperors were also divine. And Caligula wanted statues of himself put into the Temple in Jerusalem. And because the Jews would not do this, he was considering all kinds of horrors for them. Finally, it occurred to him that he would permit the Jews not to have a statue of himself within the Temple in Jerusalem, but that anywhere else outside there had to be statues, which meant that in Alexandria, in the Alexandrian Jewish temples, they were going to be desecrated by putting the false image or the image of a false god on the altars. This is why the commission was sent not from Jerusalem, but from Alexandria. I hope you can begin to understand that there's a lot of world shaking politics going on in this, and there's a lot of theological hair splitting going on, but that the issues were cumulative that come to a point. And remember that the pressure underneath us was that the Roman mind was becoming psychotic. It wasn't just a decision on an egotistical basis. It was a forced decision on a psychotic basis. And with all of this amperage of madness behind it, the Jewish community in Alexandria realized that the only salvation that they had as individuals was to cure him. And that's why they sent these elders, Therapeutae Philo and his brother and his nephew, to try and cure this individual. The Roman emperor Caligula. The short treatise which we're going to look at tonight on the contemplative life, was a part of that work. And the in the beginning of that work, he had described the essence of why the Essenes were such an ascetic group. Why in the Holy Land, people had taken themselves away from their families and taken themselves away from daily life, and had gone into retreat down at the shores of the Dead Sea. And now, in the contemplative life, he's telling Caligula that we in Alexandria have an even stricter group of people, and this is what they are. He writes, after discussing the Essenes, who zealously cultivated the active life and excelled in all, or to put it more acceptably in most of its spheres, I shall now proceed at once, following the sequence demanded by the treatment of this subject, to say what is fitting concerning those who have espoused the life of contemplation, so that the Essenes were essentially active people, even though they were in the monastic monastic community at Qumran. They produced things, they produced books. They went out from the monasteries into the cities. There were a scene groups in the cities. They were distinguished by their white wool habitats. They were distinguished by their, uh, uh, highly spiritualized manners, by their, uh, careful language and so forth. They were very much what we would recognize today as Amish, only dressed in white rather than in black, and in just not having families. But the Therapeutae were a different breed. They were not interested in the act of life at all. They were interested only in the interior life, the contemplative life, because they were the interface that was facing towards divinity. The inward realization of divinity. And the Essenes were the interface facing back into the world so that one could pass from the Asean. To the therapeutic very easily, and that the Athenians and the Therapeutae. These communities together formed a membrane, as it were, between the profane world of the material Roman Empire and the inner revelation of God's kingdom within this membrane. Because of its importance, was protected by both groups, and probably up until the middle, or even the last two thirds or three quarters of the 20th century. Everyone confused as scenes in therapeutae together. The essential fact is that the therapeutae disclose in their structure and form, an influence which is not Jewish at all. There is no monastic tradition in Judaism. The Asean development is about as far and as extreme as you can go in Hellenistic Judaism. But the Therapeutae are radically different even from the Essenes. And in order to understand the Therapeutae next week we're going to have to look at Alexandria's contacts with Buddhism, with India. For this week, we're on Philo, and we're taking a look at his description. And he's saying, now that these therapeutae outside of Alexandria, just north of Lake Mareotis, probably about 4 or 5 miles outside of the of the city, and think of a city now of several million people, big place. He says, I will add nothing of my own for the sake of embellishment, that this is customarily the practice of people to embellish it a little bit. He says, I'm going to tell the situation exactly as it is. He says the vocation of these philosophers is disclosed at once by their name, for they are called according to the true meaning or etymology of the words therapeutae and therapeutae rides. The latter would be applied to women. There were men and there were women. And the word actually means healer in English. But in order to understand the healer aspect of this, we have to bring in the use that Plato made of the terme therapia for therapia in the platonic sense, was a return to fullness, a return to the the wholesomeness, so that health was a state of fullness, not of being adjusted one way or another, or any way or any other, but being returned back to a fullness. So that therapy was the active action and the process by which wholesomeness was restored to the individual. This was health and wholesomeness in the platonic sense, was a condition of the inner crust of the mind called in Plato the noose n o u s the noose. The noose is the inner eye of insight, which, when it is returned to its fullness, is able to see not in terms of sight, but in terms of vision. And it's only by seeing, in terms of vision, that one is able to understand the cosmos. And so therapy and therapeutic, I mean restoring the inner soul or the inner eye of intuition back to its wholesomeness so that it can see so that it can envision, if you will, the cosmos. So this was their function. And they profess, writes Philo, an art of healing better than that practiced in the cities. For the latter, cure is only the body, while theirs treats also souls mastered by grievous and virtually incurable diseases inflicted by pleasures and lusts, mental pains, seers, acts of greed, folly and justice in the. This multitude of the other mental disturbances and vices, or else they are so called because they've been taught by nature and the holy laws to worship the existent. Who is better than the good, purer than the one, and more primal than the monad, the existent, so that the therapeutae, in returning back the inner noose to its visionary wholesomeness, sought to perfect a way by which, from this standpoint of wholesomeness, they could contact the souls of persons who were enmeshed in the world. And by affinities bring themselves their energies with the soul of the individual. They could restore the soul of the individual back to health. And this, of course, is um, to someone who is unknowing of these things. Miraculous. Miraculous cures. Miraculous. To the point that when we reviewed the story in Mark of Jesus casting out demons, he even raised Lazarus from the dead. Because death, the idea of death, the belief in death we saw was an illusion fostered by a demonic possession. I guess we should say today it was like a magnetized blur that had been accepted by the noose of the individual, and believed that that condition was real. When the condition was not real at all. And so the therapeutae practiced this, and the focus of their practice was to worship the existent. That is to say that the envisioning of the cosmos of God is rooted into reality. That is to say that nature is material in a profane sense, but it is real in a sacred sense. And this is why it has to reorganize itself according to the spirit, and it reorganizes itself in a very recognizable mathematical structure. Because the spirit is exact, it doesn't guess, it's not ambiguous. And so the Therapeutae were perfecting these techniques, and this was the very place, the very community that the infant Jesus was taken. It's the most appropriate place on earth. It is appropriate for Paul and for Luke who are trying to build a church, a Christian church, which is going to be a amplified Judaism. An amplification of Jewish law. Now for everybody. They have to say that Jesus was circumcised in the temple, that his mother was purified in the temple, that he was taken to the temple according to law, according to Jewish law. The fact is that from a transformative basis, he was taken to the therapeutae which is different, which is why the Gnostics and the Hermetics all originated in Alexandria, and not in Rome, and not in Jerusalem, and not anywhere else, because they had the living tradition. And this is why, Mark, when he founded the Christian Church in Alexandria, founded it not upon the extension of Jewish law, but upon the esoteric practice of transformation. This is why the Secret Gospel of Mark talks about the transformation of the individual, turning him inside out so that the kingdom of God becomes real. So that the material world is no longer material, but is an expression of the spirit. The Kingdom of God. Philo writes, who among those who profess piety may properly be compared with these? Can we compare those who Revere the elements? Earth, water, air, fire? He says it's ridiculous to even make a comparison. He says, but of those who worship the finished products of creation, the sun or the moon, or stars wandering or fixed, or even the entire heavens and universe, those who worship, uh, this way. He says, what of those who worship demigods? Surely this is even a matter for great ridicule. And what are those who worship carved images and statues? And last of all, as for the gods of the Egyptians, even to mention them as indecent. Crocodiles, ibises. Animals begotten in need of nourishment. Insatiate in their eating, crammed with ordure venom. Spraying man devouring the prey of all sorts of diseases, and perishing not only by a natural, but often a violent death, so that man becomes a slave to these kinds of creatures. And so he says that the therapeutae take themselves out of that world. And they in their community have individual houses that are not contiguous like houses in the city, but not so far apart that they don't form a community. And these houses are arranged, and within each house is a spiritual antechamber, like a closet, a secret chamber. And this secret chamber. I guess we have to use a simile here, like a spiritual bevatron, where the energy level has to be raised to a high enough level so that the forms that hold the material world, um, crack, so that they are no longer able to, uh, persuade us that they're real. The forms of the material world dissolve under certain spiritual pressure, and what's left are the relations, and the relationality is even dissolve under even more pressure, so that what is left is nothing, and nothing dissolves under even more pressure, so that what is left is the cosmos as it is in its reality. This is what they were doing. In each house there is a secret chamber, which is called a sanctuary or closet, in which they, in isolation, they are initiated into the mysteries of holy life. They take nothing into it, neither drink nor food, nor anything else necessary for bodily needs. What they do take into it are their books. The oracles, the laws, the various materials. And they review this material constantly, and they review it not as isolated material, but as one whole. All of the material that they take in is part of one whole, and the whole is a construct of the mind, because only by being able to see the mental construct in its tremendous amplification can one then go to work upon it and dissolve out the elements that are illusory. And of course, eventually all of it proves to be illusory. He writes thus, through knowledge and piety, they are increased and perfected. They always remember God and never forget him, so that even in their dreams no images are formed other than the loveliness of divine excellences and powers. This is one of the hallmarks of meditation. When one dreams without images, no images at all, which means that the substrate of the mind has lost its hypnotic. Uh. Command of the imagination. And when it's lost its hypnotic command of the imagination, the imagination is free from that substrate, and floating free from it is able then to envision. And because it doesn't, it isn't force fed any kind of material. It sees what is really there. It sees the real. Thus, many of them, dreaming in their sleep, divulged the glorious teachings of their holy philosophy. The teachings of their philosophy are not anything intellectual. They are not anything that one could have an image of. The teachings are the purity of the vision of the cosmos as a whole, which is real. Twice daily they pray and notice now the archetypal structure of their day. They pray at dawn and they pray at sunset. And of course, we've talked about this before, that dawn and sunset are not static. They're constantly moving during the course of a year. Dawn becomes a little later, a little later, and then after a while becomes a little earlier, a little earlier, and the same for sunset, so that there is a change in the motion. There's a node that becomes noticeable after many years of doing this. We talked about how the feeding patterns of animals and birds rotate on a staggered cycle. That animals and birds and fish and so forth feed about every 12 hours. But it's not exactly every 12 hours because in the morning feeding time, it's always an hour later, so that eventually the feeding cycle circulates throughout the entire day over a long enough period of time. This adds the dynamic to it. Something similar to this happens in this type of a meditation. At sunset, they pray that the soul may be fully relieved from the disturbance of the senses and the objects of sense, and that retired to its own consistory and council chamber. It may search out the truth. And at sunrise they pray for a joyful day, joyful in a true sense, that their minds may be filled with celestial light. So the discipline during the day is to not let the images that one sees, the objective things that one sees enter into the mind and make impressions. This is a very complex yoga to be able to see, to be able to live during a day without having any impressions of it. Record in oneself. This takes a lot of attentiveness and work. And then at night, to be able to sleep and not dream of any images whatsoever means that nothing is coming from the inside and registering during the night and during the day. Nothing is coming from the outside and registering that upon which these images would register, whether they come from inside or from outside. Is that membrane which, when it is clear of any imagery, whether inside or out, is able to envision the real. And this is what they were doing day and night, year after year. And this is the context and background of Jesus. The entire interval between early morning and evening is devoted to spiritual exercise. And you can see now that Farlow just says spiritual exercise. But you can begin to imagine the kind of spiritual exercise that they would be doing. They read the Holy Scriptures and apply themselves to their ancestral philosophy by means of allegory. Allegory. And here, one of the most poignant aspects of Philo comes up is that he used allegory that one should not read literally, but read allegorically, which means that in allegory, the literal sense of the words collapses, and it collapses onto a substructure which is allegorical. And it's only with the allegorical substructure, which is. Actually a an archetypal relationality, that one is able to finally press that level and have it collapse down into the openness. One cannot move from the material world to the spiritual very easily because they are identical. There's no movement. So that when one is training oneself, one has to move from the physical world to the psychical realm, and then from the psychical realm, one can move to the spiritual realm. This is how it how it works the other way. There's no movement because they are. Um, exactly. Um, the, I hate to say identical, but they are unified. That's the word. They're unified. So there's no movement at all. So they read the Holy Scriptures and apply themselves to their ancestral philosophy by means of allegory, which means that they're not taking the Jewish tradition any more qua Jewish tradition. It's just fodder and material which they're examining for a hidden structure which was never there. The the hidden structure allegorically, which comes out, was in the minds of the individuals, not in the text. The Old Testament never had an allegorical meaning. It was very literal and very basic. But to read it allegorically is to dissolve the legalism and the traditionalism and the materialism and the historicism in favor of an eternal inner construct which is seen by the mind. And reading in this way trains oneself just as they train themselves, not to let images register in the mind from their daily life. So too they read so that none of the material registered in a prosaic way, but only occurred in an allegorical way, because with the allegorical way they could move on. The danger is, is that when one becomes allegorical, one has the trouble of thinking. One has made great progress because one becomes psychic. And of course, the epitome of becoming psychic is that one begins to have images in one's mind. Which are not rooted on the material world, which transcend time and space. And the temptation is to think that one has become very, very advanced. And this, of course, is nowhere at all, because the development of this capacity is just a necessary step in learning. And the learning is a whole illusory process. Because one has to learn that one didn't need to learn it in the first place. Because one one can see the real spiritually. It's a mystical clearness and has nothing to do with the psychic capacities whatsoever. They are in fact a barrier. So in this process. In order to give them some. Substrate, some process to help the therapeutae regulate their inner yoga. And we can call it that, because it was surely that they used, um, allegory. And they believed then that words of the literal texts are symbols of a hidden nature. In the beginning was the word. So the archetype of the word. Which is a symbol of a hidden nature revealed through its underlying meanings. And we've talked about symbols and Saturday, and most of you who are acquainted with the Saturday class, realized that symbols are the interiorization of meaning from nature, through our ritualistic and mythic capacities to our inner self. The symbol is the self. The symbolic is always of the self, and that that really projects itself out into the world as consciousness. Now this is a rather magical phase, and this is what was being controlled here, because in between the symbolic realization of the inner self and its projection out its consciousness is a hiatus. It's a mystical articulation which has no human form whatsoever. And it was this aspect that the therapeutae were sensitizing themselves to. Of reading allegorically so that the symbolic would manifest, but stopping consciousness from proliferating itself and becoming magical in the sense of then restructuring a new world. So they were trying to literally catch themselves in between inhaling and exhaling and being at a balance at that. Only instead of using the lungs to inhale and exhale, the mind does that. It takes images in and gives them out, but in between always there is that membrane. The open non-reflective surface of the real. In order to help them. They had two cycles in their life based on seven. Every seventh day they would come out of their individual chambers and come together. Every seventh day, so that the Sabbath became a community day where they came together. For six days, writes fallow. They live apart in seclusion and the aforementioned closets and pursue philosophy. Filosofia on a very deep level without stepping beyond the outer door, even seeing it from afar. But on the seventh day, they get together. As for a general assembly and seat themselves in order according to their age, with proper dignity. Whoever is the oldest. Next, next. Next. Next. Keeping their hands inside their robes. The right hand between the breast and the chin, and the left drawn in along the flank. And if you can see that for yourself, if you can do that for yourself. This is the pose which the ancient Egyptian pharaohs would use on the throne. To make a proclamation or to make a confirmation, is a royal posture of verification of authenticity. That is to say, when they presented themselves in this posture, they were authenticating their presence, their existence not only as individuals, but their right as spiritual individuals to commit that individuality to the community so that the community was also real. This is very important because it was only on the face of the spiritual community that the face of God could be seen for any individual. The face of God could not be seen. It didn't register. But for the spiritual community, the face of God could be seen. No man has seen his face, but the spiritual community together as an entity is the face of God. It is very, very, very important. It's not ambiguous at all. It's as exact as you can be. It's an engineering principle. It's only by the confluence of all the elements that count. That a focus is definitely had in something exists. Only by that confluence of all of it together. Is a very important point that the Therapeutae and the Buddhists, and anybody who deals with reality in this way is familiar with. So they seat themselves according to their age. And then this posture. Then the eldest, who is also best versed in their doctrines, comes forward and composed both in expression and in voice, holds forth with reasoned argument and wisdom. That is, he speaks. He gives a sermon. He makes no display of clever rhetoric like the orators or sophists of today. But after close examination, he carefully expounds the precise meaning of his thoughts, which does not settle on the edge of the audience's ears, but passes through the hearing into the soul, and there remains securely ensconced. All the others listen quietly, showing their approval by their looks or nods. Notice follows carefulness to point out precisely that the words do not rest upon the ear of the listeners. They are practicing six days a week to open themselves up so that no images are there from the outside, and no images are there from the inside. What is there is a clarity, a frame of reference, if you like, so that the speaker then tests or practice everyone on the seventh day to see whether or not they're doing this. Because if you start to hear what he's saying as an argument or as something which you agree or disagree with, you realize that you are not doing it. If you hear it as discursive, if you hear it as a mental construct. Then you're not hearing it right, because it's up to the speaker to speak in a spiritual manner so that it's not mental at all. So that the practice was that on every seventh day you could test yourself. You knew that he was speaking spiritually, not from his mind, not from any doctrine, not from any legality, speaking from his soul directly so that the hearer would have a chance to experience and to test himself and see whether his soul was alert enough to receive that directly, without any intermediary whatsoever. If this is difficult for you to imagine, think of it as having no rebound. Think of it as the, uh, the hearing not rebounding off the ear, the inner ear, the bones or the liquid or anything, but just going straight to the brain and not even straight to the brain, but straight to the mind, and not even straight to the mind, but just straight into one's inner, uh, self. So that if all the channels were open, it was simply soul to soul, with no physicality in between whatsoever. Nothing temporal, interfering with it whatsoever. If the whole community were doing this, that community would be in eternal structure of the divine and would be the face of God. So that. They do this all the time. But in order to help themselves with expression, because they have to be able to not only have something come in directly, but they have to have something go out directly, the speaker has to have a way. And the practice of having something going out directly was raising language to the level of poetry. And not only poetry, but hymns, spiritual hymns which were then sung. And each individual had his own. Let me use this phrase charm songs which he sang from his soul. And they were his individual songs which were which occurred to him in a spiritual way. And he sang these songs to the community. This is an age old capacity of man. It goes back to the origins of man and his tribal estate to be able to, in a vision, hear songs of the divine of the Holy and bring them back to the people and sing them for them, so that, Philo says, they have also writings of men of old who were the founders of their sect, and had left behind many memorials of the type of treatment employed in allegory, and taking these as a sort of archetype. They imitate the method of this principle of interpretation, and so they not only apply themselves to contemplation, but also compose chants and hymns to God in all kinds of meters and melodies, which they perforce indict in rather solemn rhythms. So when they meet on the Sabbath, on every seventh day, every seventh day, you get the feeling here. This is why continuity is so important. Without continuity, nothing happens. Nothing. You can have every intent in the world and nothing will happen. And you can do it 99% and nothing will happen only when you do it 100% does it happen. That's why the continuity is the only religious observance there is. This common sanctuary that they come to on the seventh day in which they meet is a double enclosure. One part set off for the men, the other for the women. And then in between between the two chambers built up about 3 or 4 cubits above the floor, in the form of a breastwork is a partition, and up above that is just a clear space up to the ceiling. This serves two purposes that the modesty proper to women's nature be maintained, and that the women seated within earshot, with nothing to obstruct the voice of the speaker, may obtain easy apprehension. Now. Every seventh day this structure comes into play, and there's a rhythm. But every seventh, seventh or every seventh Sabbath, every 49th day, they change that cycle so that when they come together, the culmination is to bring the men and the women together in terms of their hymns. There's a very, very powerful discipline that's going on. That one has kept individuals six days a week practicing this most austere and arcane yoga. And on the seventh day, when it's brought together in this double enclosure to practice and then go back for six days and then come back to that and go back for six days and another seven. And after seven of these, one is brought together and there's an inner change, there's an inner penetration which is not physical and which is not psychic. This is the whole purpose of it, so that the inner penetration of men and women were in terms of the pneuma of the spirit, not of the physical and not of the psychic and not of individuals, but of the community as a whole, so that what was achieved was not the physical union of a man and a woman, or the psychical union of two souls. But the spiritual communion of the whole. And this was extremely difficult to do, as you can imagine. He writes that they lay down self control as a the sort of foundation of the soul self control. And on this they build the other virtues. None of them would take food or drink before sunset, since it is their view that the pursuit of philosophy is worthy of the light, but that the needs of the body belong to darkness. Wherefore they assigned the day to the one, and the brief portion of the night to the other. Some in whom there is more deep seated longing for knowledge, remember to take food even after only every third day. And of course, some of those who acclimated themselves to this process could go on for some time on this every seventh Sabbath, which completed 49 days. But because it was on that day, it happened on the 50th day. And remember now, from our discussions about two months ago, that the 50, the number 50 was called in the Hellenistic Judaism a jubilee, and that there was a whole book called the Book of Jubilees, which was written about the time of Enoch, and that the computation of sacred rhythms biorhythms, if you like in history, was, according to the Jubilees, that these 50 cycles, cycles of 50, were the biorhythms of the large archetypal structures of history. So that these people, the therapeutae in their. Monastic environment outside of Alexandria. And this is the very context that Jesus actually matured in. Had this as the basic structure for the development of the community as a unified expression of God. This is very important. Very important. How important is it? It is a total misconception to think of man. Becoming God is a total misconception to think of man as a individual becoming God. That is egotistical and stupid. It is equally stupid to think that mankind as a whole, ambiguously could become God. What is the delusion? The others have fantasy that it takes precision and hard work and all kinds of dedication, and a lot of continuity and self control for a selected group of perfected to come together and manifest in such a way that the rhythm of their coming together brings out the archetypal eternal structure of the divine so that it manifests. If you build a church, an institutional structure, you forever obviate any kind of spiritual community. There can be no spiritual community whatsoever. One then has an empire. One has a theocratic structure, a political structure, a legal structure, a metaphysical system. But one does not have religion, one does not have a religious community, and one does not have the real. So every seventh Sabbath was a banquet of the therapeutae, and their banquets consisted of water, pure water. Most of them took it cold, but if you were elderly, you could have your water warm, an unleavened bread, and there were two seasonings that could go with the bread. One was sea salt that was not mixed with the bread at all. Pure sea salt. And the other was a hyssop, an herb, hyssop. And this is what the meal consisted of. They gathered together every seven weeks, writes Philo. For not only do they stand in amazement before the simple seven, but it's square too, because seven times seven is the square of seven. Since we know it to be pure and perpetually virgin. This is, however, a prelude to the greatest festival to which the number 50 has been allotted the most sacred of numbers and most in conformity with nature, being formed from the square of the right angled triangle, which is the source in the generation of the all. There's a lot of neo-pythagorean structure that comes in here. Not neo-pythagorean in a mental sense, but neo-pythagorean in the mystical sense. Remember that the Pythagorean communities were double layered. Those who were admitted into the community after several years were called acousmatic. Those who could hear the truth. Acousmatic means like acoustics. Those who can hear the truth. But the inner structure with the mathematics. Those who are the truth is different. And they are the truth. Not individually, but collectively, together as an entity. So there's a lot of Pythagorean learning and structure here. Tremendously powerful. Rebirth of Pythagorean ism, but not Pythagoreanism so much, but a re-understanding of what Pythagoras understood. If we say a rebirth of Pythagorean ism, we become enmeshed in mental delusion on a very sophisticated level, but nevertheless deluding ourselves. But to re cognize to recognize what Pythagoras had recognized, that's different. That's like bringing things into resonance. And this is not a revival of ideas, but it's a living of resonance. So that what happens is, is that one feels the resonance all the way down the line. Wherever anybody had reality. This is what the Buddha meant by being able to see all of his past lives and talking about the 28 Buddhas that had come before him. He was using that kind of a simile, that it isn't a question of just recalling and have having resonance with 500 years, or a thousand years, or 10,000 years, but forever, wherever there was resonance. It's in that harmony, in that single chord of harmony. Always is there. This is why they're talking about. When, once assembled, garbed in white and radiant, but with the greatest solemnity, before reclining at a signal from one of the ephemeridae. These were the F-a muritai, the name commonly given to those in charge of services F, e m e r e u t I f e marutai ephim marutai. They take their places in rows, in orderly fashion, with eyes and hands raised up towards heaven eyes, because they were trained to gaze on things worthy of contemplation, hands because they are pure of unjust gains, and undefiled by any motive of the profit making kind. This is rather prosaic for follow to talk in this way, when the hands are raised this way there's a resonance, and when there's a resonance, this is a supplication, so that the resonance is expressed outward, and one can actually bring it in so that it focuses like that, a universal prayer. The eyes and hands raised upward means that it was not directed to any objective. There was no altar. There was no image. There was no focus whatsoever. There was only up. Which is to say, if one looks at the blue sky or, uh, some, uh, white psychological white background like that so that nothing registers, there's no image there. It's only the process and the occurrence of doing this. This is what they're doing. This is how they began thus standing, they pray to God that they're feasting, turned out to be well pleasing and according with his wish. This, again, is rather prosaic, because what they're trying to do is they're trying to attune themselves to each other in a spiritual way, so that the relationality of the community as a whole are not physical or psychical, but spiritual. So that the face of God will be. There will be that. After the prayers, the elders recline in accordance with the order of their admission, for they regard as elders not those rich in years, and of silvery brow. They consider people like this, uh, mere children, if they have only in later years come to conceive a passion for this way of life, but that those who from their earliest years have spent the prime of their youth in the flower of their maturity in the contemplative branch of philosophy, which is indeed the most beautiful and most godlike part. And here's probably one of the keys to the whole thing. Jesus was exposed to this as a babe just a few weeks old. He was brought into sync with this, so that this cycle evoked out of him as a baby the face of the divine. This was the baptism that he needed, not the circumcision of blood in the temple according to law, but the exposure to the most powerful spiritual reality that was manifest in that part of the world at that time. And it evoked out of him the the wholeness which he was. The women to take part in the feast. Most of them are aged virgins who have maintained their purity, not under constraint, like some of the priestesses among the Greeks, but voluntarily, through their zealous desire for wisdom, eager to enjoy intimacy with wisdom, they have been unconcerned with the pleasures of the body, desiring a progeny not mortal but immortal, which only the soul that loves God is capable of engendering unaided. Since the father has sown in wisdom intelligible race, whereby she can behold the teachings of wisdom. The men sit on the right, the women sit on the left. And very ordinary couches. Very ordinary wood with, uh, rattan type couches. Just slightly raised at the elbows for a little bit of of of comfort. They relax a little bit at this time. Why is this so? It's not relaxing for entertainment purposes. It's not relaxing, uh, because, uh, even to this extent, just like in giving in then and modifying the discipline, it is an essential part of the discipline. When one winds up as a spring, one has to have a moment of a pause, of relax to let it go. And this seventh Sabbath, and reclining on the couches with the elbows raised just a little bit, is the pause before letting go. So it's an integral part of the discipline. One has to know when to take a deep breath, so to speak. The scriptures are then read. The interpretations of the Holy Scriptures are made in accordance with the deeper meanings conveyed in allegory, for the whole of the law seems to these people to resemble a living being. He's speaking very, very esoterically here. He's saying to these people, they're not reading the law at all. They're dissolving the law into an allegorical relational structure. And then they're dissolving that allegorical relational structure to the reality that is their. Which is not God's laws or even the inner hidden meaning of God's laws. But God, this is what's happening. A living being. A living being with the literal commandments for its body and for its soul. The invisible meaning stored away in the words. This is the very esoteric structure. This is why speaking in parables is speaking to the soul, not to the mind. This form of speech in itself is a spiritual language. It is in the latter in the soul that the rational soul begins, especially to contemplate the things akin to itself, and beholding the extraordinary beauties of the concepts through the polished glass of the words, unfolds and reveals the symbols, and brings forth the thoughts barred into the light for those who are able, by a slight jog of their memory, to view the invisible through the visible. Then the president rises and sings a hymn composed in honor of the deity. It's a hymn of praise of cult in the Ancient Greek Apollon either a new one of his composition, of his own composition, or an old one by poets of an earlier age, for they have bequeathed many meters and melodies, iambic verse, hymns suited for processions, libations, and the altar odes sung by the chorus when either stationary or dancing well arranged metrically for its various evolutions. After him the others to sing in their places in proper order, while all the rest listen in deep silence. And so the singing begins. Then to circle through the entire group, and everyone listens in deep silence. He says, deep silence. But you can imagine this, an attenuated receptivity in this attenuated singing, coming together and kneeling itself into the present. The now, as they used to say in the 60s. When each is finished, his hymn, The young men bring in the table, mentioned a little above, on which is the supremely hallowed food. This is the communion, love and bread, seasoned with salt mixed with hyssop, and out of reverence for the holy table set up in the sacred vestibule. The Last Supper was the Therapeutae celebration of the Jubilee of the teachings. Because the teachings had taken a complete three year cycle, which was one great cycle in the tradition. Three years and the Last Supper was the culmination of that. Just like that. Then after the meal, they hold the sacred vigil, which is celebrated in the following manner after their communion. They all rise up in a body. Now they're together. Once they've taken communion, the community is together. So when they rise up, it's no longer as individuals at all, but as a single body. They rise up and at the center of the refectory they first form two choirs, one of men and the other of women, the leader and precentor, chosen for each being the most highly esteemed among them and the most musical. They then sing hymns to God, composed in many metres, and melodies now chanting together, now moving hands and feet in concordant harmony and full of inspiration. They sometimes chant processional odes, and sometimes the lyrics of a chorus in standing position, as well as executing the strophe and antistrophe of the choral dance. Then, when each choir has completed for itself its own part in the feasting, having drunk, as in Bacchic revelries of the strong wine of God's love, they mix and the two choirs become one. A copy of the choir organized at the Red sea on the occasion of the wonders they're wrought. Model above. On this, the choir of the Therapeutae, both male and female, singing in harmony. The soprano of the women, blending with the base of the men, produces true musical concord. Exceedingly beautiful are the thoughts. Exceedingly beautiful are the words August the choristers, and the end goal of thought, words and choristers alike is piety. Thus they continue till dawn, intoxicated with this exquisite intoxication, and then not without heavy head or drowsy eyes, but more alert than when they came to the banquet. They stand with their faces and whole body turned to the east. And when they behold the rising sun with hands stretched heavenward, they pray for a joyous day, truth and acuity of thought. And after the prayers they retire, each to his own sanctuary once more, to ply the trade and cultivate the field of their esoteric philosophy. And so this cycle went on. Year after year, year after year. It's in this cycle, and it's in this background that the transformative, alchemical nature of Jesus has to be understood, that there is no way to approach it institutionally. And this was the problem that came out in Alexandria with the develop of Gnosticism, because by 100 years, about a century after the. Date of the so-called crucifixion, the Christian church was becoming crystallized. The Christian church was becoming an entity which was political and theological and metaphysical. And the first revulsion against this was in Alexandria. And the character who presented that was named Valentinus. And he's the first really great Gnostic Valentinus. Well, we're going to look at the Buddhist element in all of this next week, and then the following week we'll go to the origins of Gnosticism, Valentinus, and then the following week to Marcion. And then we'll bring it together and show Clement of Alexandria again. And at that after that will be well on our way to understanding why the third century was the crisis in consciousness, because it was in the third century that all of these spiritual recognitions came to the fore and were not just available to communities, but became available to the entire world. But because there was no receptivity for it, because it was understood in a somatic way. In a psychic way, um, the energy. Was leaked and instead of producing the Kingdom of God, it produced the Dark Ages. This is important because we're living in the same time. The time is coming up to do it again, and it looks like it's probably not going to work again. So we're trying to understand these things through a a real need, and you can maybe form some impression of how serious I take these classes to be and how far it is away from watching television or. Indulging in other things in this. City of ours. Well, that's enough for tonight, I think. END OF RECORDING