India and Early Christianity

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Ancient Rome: Rome, Essenes, Alexandria, and the Book of Enoch Presentation 40 of 54 India and Early Christianity Presented by Roger Weir Tuesday, September 10, 1985 Transcript: Lecture that follows was delivered by Roger Weir as part of his Tuesday night lecture series at the Whirling Rainbow School on September the 10th, 1985. India and Early Christianity. I tried to make it just one lecture on this, but I have to. Give to. So tonight and then next week will be the same India and early Christianity. There doesn't seem to be any way to put it together into one lecture. When we look at the movement of life in a strategic sense. The contours widen and disclose to US patterns which were not visible previously. In the large program that we are just winding up at the Philosophic Research Society on Thursday nights, the yoga of civilization. We've learned to see in a pattern that's at least 3000 years long. And in that pattern, the most conspicuous event was the appearance of Alexander the Great. And if we look at a globe and a map of the world, the farthest east point that Alexander ever went to was an oasis out in the Sahara desert called Siwa. And Siwa, about 200 miles south of the coast into the desert, was the archaic shrine, the oracular shrine of Amun-ra. And it was there that Alexander went to confirm his godhead. And Siwa was an oasis, and about the only oasis anywhere in that vicinity for hundreds and hundreds of miles. It was a very special kind of an oasis. The water ran cold in the daytime and hot at night. And at the end of the classical world, there was an earthquake, and it forever sealed off this alternation of the water. And the people who lived there were seized by a social madness. And right up into the 20th century, they built a wall in between two halves of the oasis community. And even though they were an island in the midst of thousands of square miles of desert, and there probably were only several thousand people, they lived in complete polarity for over a thousand years. This is the kind of tension that is sometimes released when a sacred spot, a sacred location, an oracular focus, is desecrated. So that Siwa was the most eastern point of Alexander's life. Career. Western point, we should say. At the other end, the farthest he ever went was a city in India called Takshashila. Or as it was called, an ancient um Magadhi Takshashila. But Takshashila Taxila. And that was where Alexander halted his monolithic march towards conquering the world, because he was met at Takshashila by the Buddhist community, and they sent out emissaries, and after several long days of conferring, there was no point in further going on with the conquest, for Alexander was carrying in his spirit the vision of a ecumenical of a single world, and that ecumenical is that single world was to be manifested and held together by a single human being, by a man who had become divine, had become God. And when they met the Buddhist monks, they assured Alexander that they understood what he was saying, and that some 200 years before they had had just such a man in the Buddha. Takshashila was excavated in the early 20th century, in the 1920s by Sir John Marshall. We have here in the library the three great volumes that were published at that time. Siwa was visited just once by an army commander in the British Army. Just before the Second World War, and we have that volume here also. But the point about Alexander was that his sweep into Asia, into India, precipitated out of the climate, out of the society, out of the milieu there. The notion of a great king who could put together an empire on the basis of a vision. Previous to this, the notion of empire had been limited to power, and Alexander for all time changed that. It was no longer to be on the basis of power, but on the basis of vision. And within the next generation. In northern India there arose the great Mauryan Empire, and the first of the Mauryan emperors was named Chandragupta. And Chandragupta was one of those fine specimens of manhood, not particularly large, but dashing and courageous, sort of like Prince, uh, King Hussein of Jordan, a real fine, upstanding, uh uh, man who put together a coalition of differing peoples. He had, in popular terminology, a brain trust that consisted of people of many different races. And in order to bring home his ecumenical outlook, he took several wives of different races. And one of his wives was a Greek woman. Most of the wives bore children. The Greek woman bore one child, and the child was a physical disaster. From the Cosmo petition standpoint. He was born with mottled skin, white and dark brown, mottled and rather bug eyed and large lipped and ungainly, and he was the future Emperor Ashoka, who was the Alexander of India. And Ashoka had a very hard time as a youngster because no one wanted to be around him. Everyone shunned him. And so he simply tried harder to outdo everyone else. But he became aware from his upbringing that on the inside he was one person and on the outside he was another person, and this split in his personality produced in him an overpowering desire to somehow bring the two halves of himself together. Ashoka was the youngest of all the sons of Chandragupta maurya, and when he grew up, he managed to take the empire away from everyone else in the family and to secure it against all enemies and all odds. And when he was finished at about the age of 30, he had established for the first time in Indian history, an empire that was almost the size of British India. And when he had accomplished this, only the southern tip of India was not in in Ashoka's great empire. He was mortified at the cost in human life that he had exacted from mankind. When it occurred to him how many hundreds of thousands of people he had killed, Ashoka had a great crushing nervous breakdown, and in order to expiate himself searching around for some cure for this, he was approached by some of the Buddhists from Takshashila at that time, and they cured him. The cure was what we would call colloquially today, mind cure. But it went deeper than that. It's really spirit cure. It's showing that the mind has forced a wedge between the spirit and the body, which is untrue, and that the way to wholeness is to purify the mind so that there can be a reconciliation of spirit and body. Life may then be lived, and it is not profane. Ashoka in order to set an example by his own travail and his own achievement, set up at all the major junctures of the Empire, both internally and in all the passes that came into India. Pillars. Which upon which were inscribed the edicts, the inscriptions, or the Edicts of Ashoka. And they were the basic laws of the land. The basic code of morality. And on the top of these columns were placed three lions facing lion's heads, facing out. In the far north west of his empire, which was in modern day Afghanistan, which was at the end of the great Bamiyan Valley, which at the end leads out into a plain across which is Herat, which was a caravan stop on the way across Persia and on down into the fertile crescents of Syria. The columns there, Ashoka's columns there, had the edicts not in Sanskrit and not even in Greek, as they were on some of the pillars, but they were written in Aramaic, which was the language that Jesus spoke. This was a 230 BC, so it comes as no great surprise and no great shock to those who are acquainted with the great, mysterious sweep of history that Christianity and Buddhism have a lot in common, and in fact have an origin which is in inter penetrative. We'll get more of this next week. Now I want to focus in. On a series of publications that start with a volume called The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ by Nicolas Notovitch, a Russian who, on one of his travels in northern India, the Ladakh region, heard rumors that in one of the monasteries there were was a copy of a book which existed in the original language in Pali, written in Pali, and that the original volume was in a monastery in Lhasa in Tibet, and that it was a documentation, a history of the 18 years of the missing life of Jesus that he had spent in India. Notovitch, attempting to find his way into the monastery to ingratiate himself with the priests, found a stone wall. They wouldn't talk to him. They made mention that yes, there were such manuscripts, but that the monastery was filled from floor to rafters, room after room, with manuscripts that were uncatalogued, and there was no librarian, and they were just holding them there as a repository in, in the high Mahayana, um, religious writing may not be destroyed by man. And so everything is saved. And if something becomes true, shredded and charred, it's simply taken and exposed to the elements. Or if it's an old book, it's just stored until it finally falls into dust. But man may not destroy, for the writing is not profane, but has an icon quality to it. That reality has been made, and man should not tear this asunder. So the monastery refused to let him inspect these things. He was just there for a day, so he prepared to leave, and on his way out there was a fortunate fall, as it's known in mythology. And he broke a leg, and he had to stay for many weeks in the monastery, and he got to know the monks, and they got to know him. And so one old monk finally consented to bring the volume down, and it would be all right if he read it, and if Notovitch listened. And in fact, since he was making a verbal translation, Notovitch could write down his translation, which he did. And this was in the 1890s. Notovitch then brought the manuscript out and attempted to have it published for several years, and was discouraged on all accounts. All of the archbishops and cardinals that he talked to assured him that this would just cause trouble, and to let sleeping prophets lie. So Notovitch, finally on his own, published the volume in 1894, and it caused a little bit of consternation and then slowly subsided. It wasn't reprinted until 1978, I believe it was 1978 or 1979, and now it's available again. The first person to do anything about Notovitch's volume was Swami Abhedananda, who was a disciple of Sri Ramakrishna, a contemporary of Vivekananda, quite an excellent individual and Abhedananda, when he read Notovitch's book, decided that he would debunk, uh notovitch and he made a personal pilgrimage to Ladakh, to the city called lay la to the Hemis monastery and abhedananda there because he could read the languages. He was a great scholar. He could read Sanskrit, he could read a little bit of Tibetan. He could read a little bit of all of the major languages, uh, fished out the documents and read them himself and confirmed. That they were in fact there, and that Notovitch was quite accurate in his transcript. Unfortunately, abhedananda this book which describes this called in Bengali Kashmiri o Tibet, uh, has not, to my knowledge, been translated into English. I've not been able to find a copy, but I have here a volume of the philosophical ideas of Swami Abhedananda, and if you wish, later on on page 298, he writes in here that, um, he felt that Jesus was in fact a very great Yogi and had mastered, um, all of the higher yogic, uh, disciplines, which meant that all of the city powers were available to him. And Abhedananda is quite a credible individual. This was in 1922. Three years later, Nicholas Roerich made his way towards Ladakh, towards Leh, and in his book Altai Himalaya, he writes of his attempt in 1925 to try to get to these documents, and he writes here lay is a remarkable site. Here the legends connected the paths of Buddha and Christ. Buddha went through lay northwards and isa Jesus in um Pali. Isa communed here with the people on his way from Tibet. Secretly and cautiously. The legends are guarded. It is difficult to sound them because lamas, above all people, know how to keep silent only by means of a common language, and not merely that of tongue, but also that of inner understanding. Can one approach their significant mysteries? One becomes convinced that every educated gallong knows much, even by his eyes. One cannot guess when he agrees or inwardly laughs at you, knowing more than yourself how many stories these silent ones can tell of the passing savants who have found themselves in the most ridiculous positions. But now has come the time of the illumination of Asia. And he goes on to describe the uncanny, uh, feelings and sounds and, um, sights in the monastery. Just a few, just to give you a tone upon the walls of the room, chosen as the dining room are painted vases with many colored plants. On the bedroom walls are all the symbols the stone of the treasure of the world and the carved pillars, black from age, support the dusty ceiling with its big birendra like balusters. Little doors are above a high threshold and the narrow windows are without glass, and before nightfall the wind blows freely through the passageways. The floor is covered with bright felting from Yarkand, and upon the lower terrace a black dog barks and a white dog, and there are fellow travelers, and in the night the wind whistles, the old walls shake. Then the door closed, and after Roerich, almost no one got there. After 1925, the great game, as Kipling used to call it, which was being played between Britain and Russia and China over this area of the world, constantly seeking hegemony, had come to a pinnacle in the First World War and after the First World War, slowly through the 1920s, the situation in this part of Asia became closed down, walls went up, travel was difficult. Increasingly, the British Raj was unable to ensure passage all the little way. Stations that they had made in the high mountain passes began to be pillaged, left open to the elements. Roads became unsafe, and increasingly through the years very few people went to the Ladakh region and almost nobody went to lay and no one went to Hemis Monastery. This was the situation up until just a few years ago when, uh, two friends of mine here in Los Angeles, Richard and Janet Bach, decided to take themselves to India to try and discover as much as they could about the situation. Was this true? Was there anything to this? Us were the lost years of Jesus actually able to be recovered? And they resolved that whatever the travail, whatever the expense, they would try and meet it and produce not only a film which they did 90 minutes in color, but a book. And the book is called The Jesus Mystery, and it's by Janet. In The Jesus Mystery, she begins by presenting Notovitch's work. And I'd like to give you just a few paragraphs of his actual translation from the manuscript that he heard in lay in 1887, when Isa was 13 years old, the age at which an Israelite is expected to marry, the modest house of his industrious parents became a meeting place of the rich and illustrious, who were anxious to have, as a son in law the young Isa, who was already celebrated for the edifying discourses he made in the name of the all powerful. Then Isa secretly absented himself from his father's house, left Jerusalem, and in a train of merchants journeyed toward the sind. Sind. The sind is the northern part of the great Rajasthan desert area, with the object of perfecting himself in the knowledge of the Word of God and the study of the laws of the great Buddhas. Remember, this is being recorded in a Buddhist land, and so this is the way in which that they would conceive this. In his 14th year, young Isa, the Blessed One, came this side of the sind and settled among the areas in the country. Beloved by God. Fame spread the name of the marvelous youth along the northern sind. And when he came through the country of the five streams, which are the major tributaries there of the Indus, coming together, and Rajputan, the devotees of the god Dajani asked him to stay among them, but he left their deluded worshippers of Dejan and went to Jagannath. In the country of horses, where reposed the mortal remains of Vyasa Krishna. This is a somewhat um mythologically uh condensed um Indian name. Bhagavan Vyasa is reputed to be the author of the Mahabharata, of which the Bhagavad Gita is one. Parvan. And uh, Krishna was supposed to be the great singer who brought together the Vedas and made of them a collection rather than individual traditions. Uh, so what they're talking about here, the mortal remains of a high literate tradition, and where the white priests of Brahma welcomed him joyfully. They taught him to read and to understand the Vedas, to cure physical ills by means of prayers, to teach and to expound sacred scriptures, to drive out evil desires from man and make him again in the likeness of God. He spent six years in Jagannath and in Rajagriha, in Benares and other holy cities. Rajagriha. Uh Rajagriha means the king. Raja is the king. Um Griha uh means uh vulture. And it referred to a peak which used to be called Vulture Peak and the the Buddha, in his uh, 45 years of teaching, established certain patterns. And one of them was to come to the Vulture Peak, which was a place of exposing the dead, which was the culmination of the life pattern which was held together by the caste system. And in order to completely discredit the caste system, to pull the plug on the whole notion that human life was in a deadlock ritual, leading ultimately to only one glacially accepted end, that being death established a teaching, um, center there and just down from the summit of Vulture Peak. And so it was changed and named Rajagriha, the King of Death. He who conquers death, he who pulls the plug on this self righteous power structure which keeps human beings locked into a profane life, adjusted to a hopeless sociological theology, and opens them up to individual transformation. So this is Rajagriha where near Benares, not very far from it, and other cities. So the legend was that Isa Jesus spent six years traveling and studying in these areas. Affecting himself, and if he had arrived at age 14, he would have been about 20. At the time that he made a major change. But the Brahmins became dissatisfied with Jesus teaching because he insisted on carrying the teachings to the untouchables, to the sudras, to the lowest caste people. And of course, um, in the time of Jesus, some 500 years after the Buddha's death, a lot of the social structure had crept back in. A lot of the power mongering had come back in. And, um, the key to that was the acceptance by the power structure of Buddhism as a way of individual salvation. And that was all right. You could have individual salvation, but you could not influence the culture at large. The society at large. This was an individual affair. And this, of course, was the condition under which the Mahayana was born, the great vehicle, the idea that one does not strive for personal, egotistical liberation, but for the liberation of all beings, and in fact, that one will refuse one's own enlightenment until all others are enlightened. This was the great transformation made, and it was made at just this time. And so, with the birth of Christianity comes the birth of the Mahayana. And we find Jesus. There is a figure in both movements. So the Brahmins who were dissatisfied with him teaching to the lower caste and the untouchables decided to do away with him. And um, he said, disregarding their words, remained with the Sudras and then began preaching against the Brahmins and the Kshatriyas. He declaimed strongly against man's Arrogating to himself. The authority to deprive his fellow beings of their human and spiritual rights. Verily, he said, God has made no difference between children who are all alike dear to him. He alone has willed and created. He alone has existed from eternity. His existence will be without end. No one like him is there either in heaven or on earth. So ESA left, and having acquired finally a comprehension of the Pali language, applied himself to study the sutras and the scrolls, and after six years of study, he began taking himself through Nepal and the Himalayan mountains and everywhere, working upon his perfection. He spent another six years doing this, and at the age of 26 finished his course of study. This, of course, would have been a 12 year cycle, which is extremely important in the old traditional meditative tradition, and at the age of 26 began to make his way back across northern Asia and southern Russia to his homeland. Janet Bach writes in The Jesus Mystery of Talking in India. When they went to India, she had a personal interview with the Swami, who had inherited a ananda's, um, position. His authority was his chief disciple and his name was Prajna Ananda, and she records this conversation between her husband and Prajna Ananda Swami, would you tell us about the visit of your guru Abhedananda to the Hemis Monastery in Ladakh? Prajna Ananda yes. After 25 years in America, he returned to India in 1922. He read Notovitch's book and became very interested in the subject. He wanted to know if the scrolls existed and if Notovitch could have seen them. He went to Tibet in 1922 and he found the scrolls, and he translated them all the writings, all the life incidents of the Christ. He narrated these incidents in his book Kashmir, Tibet Deck. What has happened to the manuscripts since Abhedananda saw them? He went there, and I have heard from his own lips that he saw the scrolls, and he translated them. Years afterwards he inquired, but said the scrolls were no longer there. I also requested to see the scrolls, but there is nothing. There are no scrolls. They have been removed. And by whom? We do not know. So the original documents were in the Marlborough monastery in Lhasa, but by 1978 they were no longer there. And of course, with the Red China. Chinese army taking over Lhasa and the tremendous desecration of the monasteries and especially the libraries, all of the original documents that might have been left there forever gone. They are completely destroyed. The only documents that have survived are the tens of thousands of books that were taken out by the fleeing refugees in the late 1950s. I have to interpose something personal here. Ten years ago, I sponsored here in Los Angeles, my friend Karma Thinley Rinpoche to speak here in Los Angeles on the history of the Karmapa and on delivering a series of seminars in Tibetan language. You know, Tibetan is a very interesting language. It was actually made up. And so it does not have any kind of a folklore background. It has no peasant origins. It was made up spiritually and intellectually at a very high level. And so in Tibet, the Tibetan language itself is a sacred structure, the use of the language itself, it's a symbolic, logical system of spiritual intent. So I had karma come and speak, and one of the nights the conversation between just a few of us got around to Jesus and Karma Thinley, who was an extremely educated as a Tibetan doctor and who had studied in Lhasa, said that he himself had seen manuscripts about Jesus's life in Lhasa and that the position that both all of the Tibetan sects in the Kadampa tradition, the Kagyupa and the other sects in that tradition all respected the fact that Jesus was in fact a historical personality who had visited Tibet, and that he was considered a very high bodhisattva, um uh, bodhisattva for um. The Vajrayana is not just a generic terme, but a specific. He was a a manifestation of the Bodhisattva Samantabhadra, uh, the Bodhisattva of love with a capital L just as Manjushri, as the Bodhisattva of wisdom. Ah, Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of Mercy. Samantabhadra is the bodhisattva of love. Um, this is rather esoteric. Uh, love in the Vajrayana is the, um, confirmation of the secret exchange of cells showing that non-self is a reality for any, uh, permanent, uh, focus, that there's no eternal self which is rigidly and fixedly in one place for all time. And that because of this there is the possibility of interchange of selves, that one is quite mobile and free in the universe, and that love is the discovery that one can become the other. Um, so it's that that sort of thing. It's not, uh, it's not romantic love. It's esoteric spiritual love. Janet Bach, in her book The Jesus Mystery, goes on and says that in their travels, then after talking with Prajna Ananda, they made their way to a temple. As we approached the temple in late September, the streets were almost empty. We learned that only certain castes of Hindus were allowed inside the temple, and since we were outcasts, we would never be able to enter. One solution proposed by our taxi driver would allow us to see it anyway. The plan was to take us to the roofs of the building surrounding the temple walls. This would allow us to see inside and photograph with our telephoto lenses. The first buildings we tried was just as a grammatical error. Here we're just across from the entrance and after a suitable bribe had been paid because it was a municipal building which was closed that day, we clambered up a series of steps and ladders to reach the roof. From that vantage we could see the rectangular shape of the compound. The temple stands on elevated ground, surrounded by two walls, with a gate on each of the four sides. The main gate, facing east, is called the Lions Gate. Um, it's not only the lion, the sun rising is the lion. The coming of the light is the lion. Uh, there is a lion gate, uh, in ancient Mycenae. And there are lionsgates, uh, anywhere in the world where there are sacred enclosures. Um, the rising of the light breaks the horizon. Which was in darkness, and it has a spiritual repercussion called sometimes in the Mahayana tradition, the lion's roar. That internal delusion yells loudest and the tension is greatest just before it disappears. And it disappears by shattering itself by its own unstability. And this is called the lion's Roar. And it's just like the light comes in at that moments of breaking the horizon of darkness. So Lionsgate has a lot of resonance to it. Inside the walls are shrines, ranging from niches in the walls to larger temples. The main roof has. The main temple has four interconnecting chambers the Hall of offerings, the dance hall, the assembly hall, the inner sanctum at the base of the towering dome which can be seen for miles around. It is here the wooden images of Jagannath, where the faithful worship daily. So this was the first place that they were able to get to, and that Jesus was said to have studied there some 2000 years before. There are today some 1500 hereditary attendants at the temple, ranging from cooks and carpenters, potters, painters. So it's a very large, very, very labyrinthine. And they cater to more than 10,000 people daily. So this is an enormous complex. The real drama of Jagannath was the one going on just outside the walls, cast with the ill, the elderly, the devastatingly poor and the lepers, whose truncated limbs mirrored the unfinished arms of Jagannath. They as we were outcasts and could not enter. The point being that 2000 years had made no difference at all. Everything was bustling and clean and well-fed inside, and everything outside was decay and decimated as it had always been. This contrast is the very point which we are seeking to emphasize at this time. The institutionalizing and the organizing of wisdom effectively seals it off by doctrinal theologies, by self-serving politics, from the effective use by all beings. In other words, the light is hid under a bushel basket, well decorated and gaudy, and we will find that the issue becomes attenuated in early Christianity, more than any other place in any other world religion. And we have already looked at the contrast between the way in which early Christianity under Paul and Luke and the that, uh, horizon of early disciples and apostles had begun to make a structure called the church. And how at the very same time, on the inside of that, trying to keep itself alive was the esoteric, transformative tradition that was not based upon doctrine, but was based upon inner change, inner transformation, that transposition of one's values from one structure to another satisfies the mind, but does not purify the heart, and that instead of transposition of values from one matrix to another so that one thinks that one has leaped exponentially in quality is an illusion, nothing has happened. You're still on the roulette board. You're still playing black or white or one number or another. The game is just the same. It's called adjust to the rules and stay in line. The alternative to that was transformation. Changing the structure as in alchemy, as in the Hermetic tradition, as in the Gnostic tradition, and that this in early Christianity was affected by baptism, that baptism was a transformation of the structure of the individual from profane to sacred, whereas in the church structure the transposition was at death. So that transformation is a life process and transposition is a death process. One is saved after death, the other is a soterios of the living. Want to saved in life. This is different. I know the machines are somewhat reluctant to record these things in her book, she emphasizes also that Isa spent a lot of time at Benares. Benares was at that time the most flourishing holy city of learning in India, and that in Benares, of course, one had access to all of the major traditions. They were all brought together and, uh, taught, uh discriminately, but in a complete smorgasbord, kind of a of a presentation. Uh, the the way of learning in ancient India was that one should learn to express one's understanding, one's experiences so that it was not just a belief structure, but was also an expressive of, um, uh, argument. And, uh, one should be completely open and free than to have these arguments, these contests, these discussions with any one else. And if they would convince you that they followed a superior way, you would then follow their way, or if you convinced them, they would follow your way. This was the time honored way. This was the way that, uh, the historical Buddha completely converted all the black magicians under Mahakasyapa, the man who became the monk Mahakasyapa. Before that, he was Kashyapa, the necromancer. The one who could conjure up the serpent, fire the Kundalini, and could could transmit it from himself to other people and burn them out, and so control them by fear. And the, uh, the Buddha put his fire out to cut a mythological story short and said, don't play with matches. Sometimes it's time for reality. And so Mahakasyapa and 1000 of his great magicians converted immediately to Buddhism. So this was the this was the tact. And Benares was the center of this tradition of argumentative interchange. And one can sense, if I may editorialize for a moment, one can sense, in the words of Jesus, someone who was used to discussing. And when you get used to discussing and arguing after many years, you no longer are interested in the fine points of an argument, because you've heard these so many times that they become almost stereotyped and you start becoming a real artist with expressive techniques. And eventually one settles for the kind of, uh, ultimate resonance that one gets from parables. And so the teaching in parables is actually a very refined, um, uh, way, and one that may well have been learned in a setting like Benares, where he was reputed to have, um, been for many, many years. They then contacted someone from the Divine Life Society in India. This was Sivananda's place, and it was Swami Venkatesananda. And he translated the writing of Shivananda, who said that he had contacted through his expanded consciousness the era and had seen what had gone on, and then had reported this. And this was what Shivananda wrote, and it was conveyed to Janet and Richard back in India about six years ago, at the age of 13, Jesus left home and returned when he was 31 years old. During his absence, he traveled throughout India where he practiced yoga. After his return home, he preached for about two years and then passed into the great beyond. Jesus arrived at the Indus River in the company of merchants. He visited Benares, Rajagriha, and other holy cities, spending several years in Hindustan. He had a spirit of burning, renunciation and dispassion, living as a Buddhist monk or a Hindu monk, or as he assimilated the ideals and precepts. That is why he shows so much similarity between his teachings and those of Hinduism and Buddhism. Being a perfect Yogi. Lord Jesus could perform miracles. He stopped waves of the sea, gave sight to the blind, cured lepers through his touch, fed a multitude of people with a single loaf of bread, and so on. And the emphasis was that this was a knowledge. This was a knowledge that one had which could be taught, which could be confirmed, that, um, it took study and it took discipline. Now, the emphasis on this is that the individual human being, the personal needs to strive to acquire this, that this is something which individual effort brings forth. This, in fact, is quite a different emphasis, almost a totally different emphasis from the emphasis that the Essenes had. The Asean emphasis was always upon the community. If you recall, those of you who have been coming that the idea in esoteric, refined Hellenistic Judaism was that no man can see the face of God, but the holy community, in its sanctity, in its sealed sanctity, can be a vehicle by which the face of God can be revealed. And the practice in the Essenes was to purify the community. The individual was to be ignored by all ascetic means, so that the community could emerge into reality as a purified entity. Last week we saw that different from the Essenes were those people north of Alexandria on the north shore of Lake Mariota's, who were called by Philo the Therapeutice Therapeutae. Therapeutae, meaning healers and the process in the Therapeutae tradition was the perfection of the individual, not of the community, that there was an interchange occasionally with each other where the community came to a prominence, but almost all of the time was spent in individual study. Those individuals were in their own cells, their own small rooms, and only on every seventh day, only on a Sabbath would they come together to eat a meal together, and only on the seventh Sabbath, every 49th day being then the 50th day, would they come together and be able to say anything to each other. And what they would say then would be to sing the songs which they heard in their meditations and in their visions, and then to have a community choral hymn singing during the entire night until the dawn and when the dawn would come up. Then they would go back to their individual cells, so that out of the out of a 50 day period, they would only seven times come together to share, um, a few hours. And only once in those 50 days would they come together to sing together, that the emphasis of the practice had made a transposition from Hellenistic Judaism to something like Alexandrian Buddhism. A very interesting interplay, but that. The line here was a kind of an Alexandrian Buddhism, which was Christianity, early nascent Christianity, because the emphasis there was not on your ability to stay in the synagogue, to stay in the temple, but to achieve a personality which was spiritual, the very essence of Christianity. For it is only by achieving a personal self and then giving it up through love that one can transform completely. The first transformation is to achieve individuality. The second part of that transformation is to give it up, and it is the giving up of that achieved personality, which is eternal life. This was the message of Jesus. Janet Bock writes, talking with Sivananda's disciples. When Swami Shivananda said Christ was a great Yogi, he meant that Jesus Christ was an adept in the science of mystical meditation. He was an adept in the science of Raja yoga, Raja yoga, not bhakti or kama. Raja Yoga, which is the comprehensive, which is the classical science of meditation expounded by the great sage Patanjali, incidentally expounded several centuries after Jesus's time. The aphorisms, the yoga aphorisms of Patanjali are even to this day, the ultimate authority of the science of meditation. It's a science based on control of the senses, the restraint and regulation of the breath, of the subtle inner force, vital force, and the gradual disciplining of the mind so that it is trained to gradually become indrawn. So it's the mind that needs to be disciplined through Raja Yoga. There's some connection between the achievement of a personal and the control of the mind by bringing its structures inward to a focus. If the mind has in a false way, kept spirit and matter separate as categories, so that there was an inner and outer a life and a death, if that is but a structure of the mind which is wedged itself into all perception and all conception. If that empire withdraws its limits inwardly to a focus which is a vanishing point, what is left, then is the single unsplit tapestry of unity between spirit and matter. And then, of course, the transformation of matter is as simple as the transformation of the spirit. So Shivananda went on to say about this Indrawing. It is withdrawing the mind from its outgoing tendency, from its state of being dispersed amongst the outer objects of this external universe and changing its direction, thus disciplining it to become internalized, gradually mastering its constant restless movement so that the thought processes become conquered and a state of absolute one pointed concentration is brought about. This is the one Pointedness called in, uh, ancient um uh Magadhi, the dialect of Pali spoken by the Buddha called Ekagrata. And this concentrated mind is focused upon the ultimate reality, the inner object of our meditation, so that when, through continuous and persevering efforts efforts, one is able to bring about a continuous flow of the concentrated mind. Upon this one specific focal point, one enters into a state, then of meditation and through meditation, through maintaining that ultimately the mind is transcended. The mind becomes no mind, as it were. The mind is transcended and one attains to a state of supramental superconsciousness, where one is oblivious to the other surroundings, one transcends body consciousness, isn't completely dead to the senses in the body, and one attains to a state of illumined spiritual consciousness, super consciousness, which is called samadhi. In the state of samadhi, one transcending mind and intellect, ascends upon the mystical as it were, and attains to a state of illumination, divine illumination. One becomes liberated from the trammels of senses, body, mind, and the little ego consciousnesses. This was the science mastered by Jesus, and this is what is meant when it is said that he was a master adept of. Okay. So this is what they were told. They tried to go to Ladakh. They tried to go to L.A. and they were unable to get in at that time. And so it suddenly occurred to them they were in India, and they had talked to a number of Hindu masters about this. They also talked to Sathya Sai Baba, who confirmed that Jesus was in fact a master Yogi, and so forth. Then it occurred to them that there was in fact a historical Christian tradition in India that the disciple Thomas had been sent to India. And so they went to the sites of the historical Thomas in South India. We have, of course, the gospel according to Thomas, which was recovered in our time and our century, and the gospel according to Thomas, to my mind, is one of the great documents of world spirituality, and it is famous for its directness. Uh, there's no metaphorical or convoluted type of description. The way Thomas describes spirituality, as he says. Um, if one would find Jesus split the rock, he is there. We also have the Acts of Thomas written in the two hundreds, in the third century, and in the acts of Thomas Janet Bach quotes. When the apostles had been for a time in Jerusalem, they divided the countries among them, in order that each one might preach in the region which fell to him, and India fell to the lot of Thomas. And Thomas reaction was, I am a Hebrew. How can I teach Indians? And when he came to India, only because of his stubbornness, only because of his incredible tenacity, did he make it to India. Conditions were very, very difficult to get there, and only because of his stubbornness was he able to stay there. And he established eventually a church and the church. The Thomas Christians still exist in India to this day, and they call themselves Thomas Christians, and they are still there in South India. And there is, in fact, a photograph in the book of the Church of Thomas, uh, located in Mylapore, India, and about six miles from there, uh, Thomas is buried and Thomas is the only direct disciple of Jesus, uh, whose tomb, whose grave site is known. Uh, this is part of the startling veracity of India in Christianity. And one can actually visit the site. And it is in fact, their tradition says that Thomas, uh, very often would meditate in caves and that he was pursued by Brahmins and, uh, tried to be done away with because they recognized that he was like Issa. He was preaching, uh, to ignore the caste system, to ignore the social structure, um, render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and render unto God what is God's. And of course, when you transform, uh, nothing as Caesar's, he has nothing, including no handles on you, including no handles on anyone who gets the message. And so the power structures dissolve. And this, of course, is a threat, just as it's a threat to the ego to find that its tyrannical control of the person is vanishing. Uh, and it lashes out and projects out and transfers out all of the whole panoply of negativities in order to defend its position against this encroaching transformation in South India. The first Europeans to go there were the Portuguese, and the Portuguese found the ruins of Thomas's church, and in among the ruins they found the mythological object that had been reported mythological because it had seemed like it was just a myth that Thomas had been killed by a Brahmin priest who had lanced him from the back, and that Thomas had clung to the altar stone cross which he had carved out, and that his own blood had consecrated this cross, and that the weight of his body had pushed this cross over, and that they had simply buried him in the cross and everything. And this was the myth, this was the tradition. The stone cross was rediscovered by. The Portuguese and March 22nd, 1547, during excavations for the foundations of the present church. One Francis Gouvea described the stone as well carved and a bird touching with its beak. The top of the cross, so that in the cross was a bird symbol of the spirit, with its beak touching right at the very top horizon of the cross, so that what is the sunrise of that image is the sound of the bird's voice, which is the perfect Gnostic symbol of the crowing of Abraxas, that is the realization that sets one free. The Portuguese went on to say, there was found under the stone much earth still bedewed with blood, as if it were freshly shed, a good portion of it being attached to the stone itself. There are reports of miraculous bleeding of the stone from 1551 to 1704. One account reads. In the year 1558, on the day of the feast expectation of Our Lady. December 18th, when the singing of the gospel of the mass was started, the stone of the cross began to turn black in color and to distill water in such large quantity that those who so willed soaked their linen in rosaries in it. This time the miracle lasted for four continual hours, and when it came to an end, the stern stone turned to a very white and resplendent color, which gladdened all present and drying itself slowly. The stone lost the bright color and returned to its natural color. And so they went on, and they described more. Then the box themselves went to see the stone cross. The day of our visit, the stone was gray, with no sign of a brighter color. The modest stucco church stood on the rocky hilltop, old and alone, with the forbearance of one who had been rooted to one spot while suspecting that somewhere on another side of the world, the message that was here too had carried and gained power, riches and glory beyond almost imagining, and had affected history in the lives of hundreds of millions. So they saw the cross themselves, and they found that the Thomas tradition in India was very much alive. Next week, we're going to go back to Ashoka and work our way up. We have a lot of information that has not been available to other people. We have a lot of the documentation. We know that Ptolemy Philadelphia sent envoys from Alexandria to the Second Buddhist Council, which was held about the year 400, in Rajagriha. We know that there were a held about 270 BC in Rajagriha. We know that there was a tremendous contact between Alexandria and all of the spiritual points of the world that, in fact, the translating of the Old Testament into Greek, the Septuagint was part of a massive program of the first 2 or 3 Ptolemies to bring all of the world's spiritual traditions into one language, Greek, and that the reason for this was to satisfy Alexander's ecumenical vision that the only way to have an ecumenical empire was to have an ecumenical vision, and that needed to be based upon a population of people who had access to every spiritual tradition in the world, regardless of where it was. And the choice of Greek was because it was an extremely expressive and archaic language. An early proto-greek goes back at least 3000 years before the Ptolemies. Greek is not a recent language. Those 19th century scholars who said that Homer couldn't have written those epics because nobody wrote them down, simply are outclassed by the reality. Linear B, an earlier form of Greek, was used in the Minoan Empire some 1800 BC, and linear A before that was used several thousand years before that. In linear A is very close to Old Phoenician, and Old Phoenician is very, very close to what we understand as the proto languages of India. And even today we can see that Philologically Sanskrit, Classical Greek are very, very close in many, many cognates and language structures. But when you go back 2 or 3 levels, one finds the same language. The purpose in Alexandria was to reinstate. It a single world vision. And in order to float that vision, there needed to be a population of those who were schooled in all the world's traditions in one single language, so that within one movement of a lifetime one could produce a master religion, as it were. We have seen that in the church orientated Gospels. The tradition is always to blend Jesus into the church structure. The gospel according to Luke says that when he was a little baby on the eighth day, according to temple ritual, he was taken to the temple and purified along with his mother after the birth, and then that they were living in Jerusalem and eventually went north. But we can see that from Matthew, which is not church oriented, but is a gospel which is put together by five documents which are almost word for word Mnemonically recorded um, uh, speeches. The sermon on the Mount is one part of Matthew. The tradition is that Herod was out to kill all of the babies, because the Persian and Chaldean Magi had said that the replacement for the kingship was being born in a child, and that they were following the star which would coordinate itself. And so in Matthew it has said that Mary and Joseph, being warned of this, fled and went into Egypt. And it was only after Herod died that they left Egypt. Now Mary and Joseph were saints. There's almost no doubt of that. Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist, was a sister of Mary, the mother of Jesus. They were saints, but the only point of contact in Egypt for people like this, for a scene a travelers that they could have been put up for some length of time were in the therapeutic communities north of Alexandria, so that the little baby Jesus, the little child Jesus, would have been exposed very early on the very first part of his life to this kind of a tradition when he was 12 and was already able to hold his own in the temple with the elders, to argue, to make his points. He was already independent enough so that it was finally noticed that he was missing from the caravan, and only after three days of traveling all the way back to Jerusalem, they found him in the temple, still arguing and holding his own. And according to the gospel telling his parents, uh, don't be interrupting me. I am about important business and already had made that transformation, had already shifted himself towards the, uh, chivalry tradition of developing oneself to be of service to the master. There is no more trace after that of Jesus in Galilee. There's no more trace in Judea. And it's quite likely that he moved on and traveled, for when John the Baptist first saw him, he didn't recognize him. Even though they were cousins, first cousins. It was only after seeing him up close that he recognized the transformed individual. It would seem that Jesus spent some time in India some long time, but next week we're going to consider the possibility that before he went to India, he went back to Alexandria, went back as a teenager, went back as a 13 year old Jew, which is the time for one's bar mitzvah of becoming a man. And that before he went to India, he became a man in the esoteric, therapeutic Jewish tradition. Because in the teachings of Jesus, they're not presented as a Buddhist, they're presented as a Jew, but as a very special kind of a Jew, not an assassin, but a therapist, a healer, one for whom inner transformation is the goal and community is, uh, a very nice setting to talk about, but it has very little to do with the real Kingdom of God that building a church is secondary, or maybe even tertiary, or maybe even not necessary. He always spoke about the kingdom, and I don't think he ever mentioned a government. Well, that's about as far as we can go tonight. Friends, thanks for coming out on a night like this.