India, Jerusalem, and Alexandria

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Ancient Rome: Rome, Essenes, Alexandria, and the Book of Enoch
Presentation 42 of 54

India, Jerusalem, and Alexandria
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, September 24, 1985

Transcript:

The date is September 24th, 1985. This tape was made at the lecture of Roger Weir at the Whirling Rainbow School in Los Angeles. The subject was India, Jerusalem and Alexandria will commence in just a minute.

I know it's hard to collect your thoughts and doubly difficult to redirect them back to 1000 years. I might just remind us all again. I need to remind myself. I know all the time that this is very potent material not to be talked of lightly. And if I seem to flow along from time to time, it's certainly not out of confidence in Glibness. But rather that's the way that my mind works when I'm serving you. And I'm like, um, an attendant here to deliver a certain amount of information. But the information is not doctrine, and it's not codified, and it's never been put together by anybody else at all. And so I have to go into a kind of a state of mind, and I have to have a certain amount of dedication, uh, like a rudder in my heart. And then I just go with that. So if it seems like this is all worked out and confident in everything, please, um, put a hitch in that. Nobody's ever talked this way before about this material, but somebody has to talk this way about this material because we're caught into a real bind in our time. And we've shown so much dedication and courage and face of ignorance that one cannot but hope that with a little bit of. Better quality background. Just even half that effort will deliver us into a much better world. So that's what all this is about. And the main theme is that about 1700 years ago, a worldwide civilization collapsed and left a lot of ruined.

Shards of psychic material sticking up all over the world. And the reason why that world civilization collapsed was because of lack of confidence. They couldn't believe that they had it. They couldn't believe that they had done it. And out of disbelief. The whole nature of the wisdom and the understanding and the integration began to go asymmetrical. And finally it crashed. And when it crashed, it took with it all of the political structures of the time. It took the Roman Empire, it took the Han Empire in China, it took the Kushan Empire in India. It sank them all. The early third century. So we're left in our collective unconscious, whether we like it or not, with all kinds of broken glass from a vision which was very powerful, much more powerful than any vision we have today. The 20th century is paltry in terms of spiritual vision. These people were as strong and spiritual vision as we are in technology. And so we have the supposition that there are ruined civilizations thousands and thousands of years ago, 10,000 years ago, different continents and so forth. And all of that is a fantasy. All of that is reflective glare, psychic disturbance. But the confirmable verifiable situation is that a worldwide, sophisticated civilization based on a shared spiritual vision collapsed about 1700 years ago, when the world is still crawling out of that crater and in a very strange way, ironical way.

The east and the west are crawling out of the same crater and part of the civilization. Karma of this planet. Is that the only way any of us are going to get out of that crater and get whole again, is together. There isn't any part of this world that's going to get healthy before any other part of this world. It's got to all be done together. It's got to be synchronized. And probably now in late 1985. Enough people are starting to understand that basic ABC lesson, that the only way we are all going to get healthy at all is to do it together. That this is some fantastic game, which we're going to keep losing until we stop playing the game and do it for real, and then we'll win. And late in 1985, the whole world is actually learning to cooperate in odd ways. The preparations for Halley's Comet towards the end of this year. Case in point. All over the world, all of the astronomical organisations in every country in the world are working together in one coordinated outfit, coordinated at a centre in West Germany to just investigate Halley's Comet, because nobody has any particular political mythos about the comet. Nobody has anything at stake in the comet except curiosity, shared curiosity. And the odd thing is, is that the worldwide scientific community is learning that it's really kind of interesting to work together on a worldwide scale.

And so Haley's comet is really bringing us together. It's like an omen towards the end of this year saying, this is the way my children and no other. So when we direct our minds back now, we direct our thoughts back. It's with very serious, practical purposes to try and clear up our deepest dreams. And at the core of our deepest dreams is that broken religious vision that is still there for all of us, and we have to see it whole. We have to be healed and mended in that way, because it doesn't matter how cute or clever, how powerful, or how ingenious our individual solution to life might be, we're all like those buildings in Mexico City. We're all built on an ancient lake bottom, and every time the earth moves, that lake bottom trembles and it will knock us all down. And there wasn't any way that we can effectively build a personality that's going to transcend those conditions. So our basic mind, our basic consciousness are the basic depth of our being needs to have a little air, a little fresh air. And so that's what we're doing here. So this material. If I seem confusing from time to time, it's that I'm trying to coordinate. I've got three, six. I've got nine books up here and it would take two days to read any one of them. And something like this, that's, uh, 8 or 900 pages and scholarly and so forth. It would take you a year.

And so I'm trying to balance all this for you. A hundred years ago, a little more than a hundred years ago, in November of 1879. There was a culmination of a prophecy that had been made early in the 16th century, somewhere around 1505, by a man named Trithemius, who was at the time ostensibly very kind, wise abbot of a monastery, and who at the very same time was the esoteric master of the Hermetic tradition. And he said that in November of 1879, 375 years in the future, that there would arise a very special world condition in which the West would be able to grasp the East, and that that would be the beginning of a new era. There are many individuals at that time who were doing just that sort of thing, but very few of them conscious, I mean, conscious in a broad sense. And one of them, who has largely been forgotten, was a man named Arthur Lillie. L I l l e. Here's a book published in London, 1887, called Buddhism and Christendom. Or Jesus the Assassin. And one reads through his work and finds that a lot of what we've been developing here was seen and partially understood by him here 100 years ago. The question is, was there any relationship between. India and the West at the time of the first century BC first century A.D.? And when you set that into context, you understand immediately that the association that comes up is that, yeah, there must have been because Alexander the Great went to India.

Everybody knows that. He took his whole army there. He took 20,000 Greeks and 30, 40,000 mercenaries and went all the way to the core of the Indus Valley. And he did that around 330 BC. And not only that, we know that the Persians, 200 years before that Darius conquered that part of North India, and they also conquered Egypt, so that India and Egypt were in the Persian Empire together under Darius about 500 BC. And when we think about that, we think that at the center of the Persian Empire, about 500 BC, were the exiled Jews who were being held in the very center of the Persian Empire, at that time in exile, in a condition of suffering. The exile was not a vacation. It was a condition of what's known in the American Indian tradition of crying for a vision. God help us. What have we done? What must we do? Give us some sign. And while adolescents look for signs like individual objects, mature, wise people sense the pattern of the whole. What is the pattern of the whole? This is the largest augury. Not looking for omens and signs, but sensing the pattern of the world as a whole. What is happening at that time? Egypt and India are being held together in two hands by a Persian mentality, which is from the origins of its cultural matrix.

Seen things in black and white, good and bad, stronger, um, good and evil. And with this kind of symmetrical loggerhead to the Persian mind. They now held Egypt and India, and the Hindu and the Egyptian spirituality were both opened and exfoliated to the nth degree. And so this Persian steel bar of an empire was holding at both ends the most effervescent civilizations that have yet appeared on the planet ancient India and ancient Egypt. It was this Persia that Alexander displaced. He conquered that Persia, and in conquering that Persia he took control of Egypt and India both. But Alexander didn't have the black and white loggerhead mentality that the Persians had. Alexander had the clear sighted Greek vision based on Homer. And the overwhelming assignment, if you want, from the gods to make a single world. That's what he was told at Siwa. It was whispered in his ear. It was whispered in his ear, just like they used to whisper the opposite in Rome. In the ear. You know, during the triumphs they used to whisper, you are not a god. You are not a god. When you would enter Rome in your chariot with all your troops and your treasures and the millions of people cheering you, they would whisper, you're not a god. But to Alexander and Siwa alone, they whispered to him, you are the God. You're the one. You bring this world together. It is your world to do this. And so Alexander put on two masks, not on his face, but on the back of his cranium.

Over the medulla. The mask of the lion roaring. And the mask of the ram with the horns. The ram with the horns is the configuration of the brain. And the lion is the configuration of the heart. And this is the way a god moves with mind and heart. Wide open. Throttle out, foot down. Accelerate! Let's go. No ifs whole. That spirit of Alexander coming in and taking over Egypt and India at the same time was an unbelievable situation. And the fact that he died in Babylon as a young man was purely archetypal karma. What is called in the Theravadan tradition, a pudgala yoga. He died where the exile was in Babylon. He had left it unfinished. He had brought everything together, and it was all up in the air. And then he was gone. The God was gone. And there were only mortal men talented, tough, ambitious, clever, but mortal men. And after days and days of discussing it with their swords on the table, all of Alexander's generals decided that they would just cut up the pie. And the only way that they knew. I'll take what I can and you take what you can. And if we run into each other, watch out. This set up a whole cycle. Of 300 years of turmoil, which was called the Hellenistic era, and for 300 years the world was up for grabs and nobody could get a hedge on it.

And none of the Hellenistic kingdoms that were set up could effectively make Alexander's vision stick. And in the meantime, we've seen that Rome in this time came on like a steam engine out of nowhere. And by the time the Hellenistic kingdoms realized that somebody really tough had come into the ring, Rome had taken the whole cake. And with Augustus Caesar, the world was put back together. But what was left out of Alexander's world vision was India. It was the missing piece. It was the only piece that was not there. India never became a part of the Roman Empire. But India still maintains its status as a Hellenistic kingdom for a long, long, long time. They still had Alexander's vision without the Roman overlying. They were untouched. They were uncontaminated by the power of Rome. And so the Buddhism that we're talking about is not the Buddhism of the Buddha. It's not the Buddhism of the traditional way, but it's the Buddhism that for 300 years was cooked in this Greek Greece until it changed its character. And it was no longer Indian Buddhism, but it was Greek Buddhism and Greek Buddhism. Was a very, very powerful synthesis because it had Alexander's vision of a God man uniting the world together. All sentient beings will be in one family. But it had the Buddhist technique to go beyond the simple arrangements of a mind, and to go into all of the hierarchies of the spirit into the soul realms.

And so what grew up there was the Mahayana and Greek Buddhism was a Mahayana. That's what they called it. They said, we're not in this to save ourselves. We're in this to save the entire universe. It's a paltry thing for somebody to go and find enlightenment by themselves. We want it for trillions and trillions of beings and billions and billions of worlds, and we'll have nothing less. This was outrageous. It was unheard of. And this Mahayana had in it something which the old Theravada did not have. It had a missionary drive. We're going to spread this good news to everybody because everybody needs to have it. And so the Mahayana is a Hellenistic Buddhism which had a missionary sense. And when you look at the maps of the spread of world religions, you see that for 500 years, Buddhism never left the little Ganges area of northern India for 500 years. And then all of a sudden, like some slingshot, within 100 years, Buddhism had swept over into all of Central Asia, into China, and another hundred years would be penetrating through two thirds of the Earth's people. But they don't show any areas going west. They always think that, well, nothing got through. And that's ridiculous. That's ridiculous. But the way in which the Mahayana thought was so sophisticated in its syncretism that one would not know if you were naive, that you were talking to somebody in the Mahayana.

You don't even have to be a Buddhist to be in the Mahayana. And so those influences that came West were very, very mysterious. You couldn't really put a name on them. But when the influence collected in one place and manifested, then you could point to these places. And we have seen that the Asean communities in the Dead Sea area and the Therapeutae in the Alexandrian area were definitely influenced by something outside of the indigenous traditions that were there. But in such a way that the influence coming in did not bring a doctrine, but brought a methodology. And that's just what the Mahayana has. They don't really have a doctrine. They have a methodology which is called look deep into yourself and bring out that whole array of cosmos which you have tucked inside yourself. And when it comes out, it's coming out. Those sparkles and those colors and those visions. You will change your world without anybody having to tell you to do it. And so the first century BC looks to the cognoscenti like a carnival. Yeah, it's political warfare on the surface, but deep down inside, the spiritual traditions are opening up all the windows, all the doors. They're taking the roof off, and the whole spiritual tradition just opens wide open. And in the Mahayana, the central synthesizing vision was that the historical Buddha was a forerunner to another Buddha who would come 500 years after him, called Maitreya.

The Buddha of Universal love. If we look for material, if we stop talking this way just for a moment, if we look for material, what do we find? We find two documents. One of them Jewish and one of them Buddhist. One of them from Jerusalem and one of them from Ceylon. Which are remarkably similar in style and in content. The one from Ceylon is called the Questions of King Milinda. Exists in a couple of volumes of paperback. The Jewish one is called the Letter of Aristeas. A r I s t e a s. The questions of King Milinda. The letter of Aristeas. Both of these documents, they really do exist are dialogues. They are dialogues of high royalty meeting, high spirituality, the chief priest and the kings coming together to discuss reality, what's real and how do we know it's real? And is there any way that we could be mistaken in our knowing, or in the ways in which we are knowing, or what we know? In other words, how can we confirm that the Empire, that the person that the religions are well founded, how do we know that? And in each case, the person who is maintaining the negative is a supremely sophisticated intellect. Somebody who's very good at poking holes, somebody who has all of the logical arguments at their command, and they're the ones who are going to interrogate somebody who's supposed to be wise, and they're going to find out, does anybody know? Or is this world just full of children and there are no adults? But if there are adults, now is the time to bring them out.

Well, let's turn first to the questions of King Milinda. Milinda is the way in which the people of Ceylon pronounce a Greek name. In Ceylon they have sort of a southern accent. Pali, the language of Ceylon, is a kind of a southern accent. In Sanskrit, the word dhamma is pronounced in Pali Dama, dama, your. Melinda is Menander. And it turns out that Menander, sure enough, was a great king who ruled in northern India, actually lived there, actually ruled there around 100 BC. And then the questions of King Milinda. When we look at the book itself, it's very curious. It's about the only Asian book that's written as a work of art. Most Asian books are didactic. I mean, the Upanishads are supremely beautiful, but they're not works of art. The Mahabharata, the Ramayana, they have their charm, but works of art, they are not. They're not works of art like Greek things like the Iliad or the Odyssey, or Pindar's poems, or Thucydides histories or Aeschylus tragedies. Because the Greek sense of shaped form has become really our criteria for what art is. And the questions of King Milinda in shape are a Greek work. It's shaped by a Greek mind, and we can appreciate this as a work of great literature, which it is. Whoever did this was somebody in this work.

Menander or Milinda rules at a very famous town. At least they say it's famous. Nobody seemed to know where this was for a long time. Sagala. It says here King Milinda at Sagala, the famous town of yore. To Nagasena, the world famous sage repaired. And then it gives a simile like the deep Ganges to the deeper ocean flows. In other words, King Milinda is wise, like the deep Ganges River. But Nagasena was wise like the ocean as wise a king is wise like a mighty river, running through the land and organizing the land and giving fruitfulness to the land. But all of that energy, the purpose of which is to join the ocean and the ocean, is ever so much more mighty than any river. And so nagasena. And it's an interesting name because Naga means snake, snake, snake, seer, king of the snakes. Milinda is a king of men. But Nagasena is a king of snakes. Nagas especially are underground spirits. They're the protectors of spirituality and they're under the ground. And in times of crisis, they come up above ground. In times of storm, they come up above ground. And in the in the traditional stories of the enlightenment, the Buddha didn't sit just under one tree. The Bodhi tree was the fourth tree. He sat under four trees a week each. And the real crisis was not under the Bodhi tree, but under a tree called the Mucalinda tree. And it was under the Mucalinda tree that he was really tested to see if he's going to break.

And it was under the Mucalinda tree that the Naga Serpent King came out. And understanding that this was a supreme test for him, wrapped himself seven times around his body and then put his hood over his head to protect him. Great. Huge cobra. Well, part of the test is, can you sit still while he does that? Because if you've got any fantasies at all, they're going to come out. And to sit there for seven days like that, you've got to be together. So Nagasena is that sage who has that capacity? And it's a very curious thing because in questions of King Milinda, they say that King Milinda and Nagasena are karmically related for a long time. In fact, it says long, long time ago, in the days of another Buddha, eons ago, the two of them were monks together. Sure enough, they were monks together, and their assignment was to sweep the courtyard. And the one monk just wouldn't finish his work. He sort of daydreamed all the time. And the other monk got sort of fed up with him, and so clubbed him with his handle of his broom. So the other one, crying and weeping, started to clean his work up, and he kept making a intense, um, call saying, I hope that someday I'm really powerful, really powerful. I won't have to take this anymore. And I want to be really sharp minded and everything.

And then, of course, you better watch what you ask for in this world, because you really get it. Well, the other monk overheard him, and the other monk thought. I'd better do something to counteract this, because I'm the one that clubbed him. So I hope I'm there when he's powerful and I hope I'm wise enough to mellow him out. And so here come ages later, Milinda and Nagasena. And they're going to sit down together. And as they sit down together and talk, they sort of get a feeling. Don't we know each other? Haven't we been through this before? What in the world's going on? And nagasena slowly reawakening, getting the recognition flowing, getting the memories flowing. And King Milinda, who ostensibly first is just trying to win an argument. He's going to be king. In fact, it says in the questions that he has 500 men from his kingdom who always come around him whenever he's arguing with somebody because he always wins. And in the first half of the book, he's interested in winning the argument and the second half of the book. He really gets interested in enlightenment. He sort of loses interest in winning the argument because he starts to remember, oh yeah, that's right. There is something to know. And it's not winning the argument. But there is something called gnosis, which is quite real, and it's that that we're working towards. And if we work together in this dialogue, we are going to find it.

No doubt. And so the second half of King Milinda, like the second half of Homer's two epics, one is how you got way out there, and the other one is how you get back from there. Get home. Home to enlightenment. I mean, if Paradise isn't home cooking, what good is it? So in the questions of King Milinda, it says that all this in fact happened in a very, very famous town called Sagala. It says, thus hath it been handed down by a tradition there is in the country of the Eunuchus Yonaka is the way in which the Pali pronounced ironian. Ionian Greeks in the country of the Eunuchus, a great centre of trade, a city that is called Sagala, situated in a delightful country, well watered and hilly, abounding in parks and gardens and groves and lakes and tanks, a Paradise of rivers and mountains and woods. Wise architects have laid it out, and its people know of no oppression, since all their enemies and adversaries have been put down. Brave as its defence, with many and various strong towers and ramparts, with superb gates and entrance archways, and with the royal citadel in its midst, white walled and deeply moated, well laid out are its streets, squares, crossroads, marketplaces. Well displayed are the innumerable sorts of costly merchandise with which its shops are filled, its richly adorned with hundreds of alms halls of various kinds, and splendid with hundreds of thousands of magnificent mansions which rise aloft like the mountain peaks of the Himalayas.

Its streets are filled with elephants, horses, carriages, foot passengers frequented by groups of handsome men and beautiful women, and crowded by men of all sorts and conditions Brahmins, nobles, artificers, servants. They resound with cries of welcome to the teachers of every creed, and the city is the resort of the leading men of each of the differing sects. Shops are there for the sale of banners, muslin, of cucumbers, stuffs, and of other cloths of various kinds, and sweet odors are exhaled from the bazaars, where all sorts of flowers and perfumes are tastefully set out. Jewels are there in plenty, such as men's hearts, desire, and guilds of traders in all sorts of finery display their goods in the bazaar that faces all quarters of the sky. The machines don't like to hear this. It says that in its glory, this city rivaled the city of the gods. Now a lot of people have tried to identify where is this cigala and have said, well, it must be some Greek city in India. I don't think so. I think there was only one city that was this stupendous, that it would take two full pages of description in a Buddhist sacred book. Yeah. Alexandria. I think it's a transposition, as one would do in a magnificent way of transposing the cultural, civilized headquarters of this mentality, which is the true setting for this figure, King Menander.

It's prosaic to think that he's just king of this city, or of this empire here, that we can see geographically. When you're thinking as deep as the author of King Milinda thought, then you think that so and so is not just a representative of the city of LA, but is a representative of the human race, that kind of a context. And I think that Milinda was put into the context of Alexandria, just like Nagasena is going to be put into the context of the ancient Buddhist tradition as seen by the Mahayana. And the way the Mahayana saw it was that the Buddhist tradition was not just from some living person named Siddartha who attained enlightenment, but that the Buddha was a cosmic figure who projected himself from Tushita heaven into that situation, and does it every so often to help sentient beings come along the way towards achieving nirvana. And in fact, in King Milinda, in The questions, Nagasena is shown to be a reincarnation of a god, a Mahayana Buddhist god named Mahasena. And in fact, the way that Mahasena gets into the picture is that the reputation of Milinda spreads throughout all the Buddhist realms, that he's a very tough arguer, and you can't really beat him in arguing, but he loves to argue with religious wise people especially. They're his fort, they're his meat. And every time he hears of somebody who's supposed to be wise in religious things, he goes after them.

He takes his whole entourage to wherever they are or brings them to his palace. And that's why there are no wise people living in Menander's land. All the wise men, they say, have head out for the hills. There is nobody there to argue with them anymore. And so Menander has sort of set himself up more and more, and you can see the archetypal fashion. He's the expert and there ain't no truth. This is the this is the epitome of the arrogance. You see, I know more than they do, and I know that I don't know, so there's nothing to know. It's that kind of a thing. And you can get up and feel cheerful a lot of mornings with that kind of pride. The problem is, is that when it wears thin, it wears out and it goes. And so Melinda has gotten into this situation so that the word has spread up to the high Himalayas. And they're at a place called the Guarded Slope. All of the high powered Mahayana esoteric sages by telepathy, say, we've got to do something about this king down there. He's getting out of hand. Who do we have that we can send? And they decide that they've sent everybody they have and they've all lost. So they say, well, we're going to have to appeal to heaven. We're going to have to send the message that you guys are going to have to do something to help us out.

So they get this God mahasena they trick him into wanting to incarnate. He says, I should leave this place to become a human being. You know what it's like to be a human being. I'm having a good time here. I'm going up on the hierarchies higher and higher. And you want me to go down there and that mess? Why would I want to do that? If you give me an answer to that, maybe I'll go. And somebody says, well, sir, how about just for helping out, man being good service. And the God can't come back to that. And so he's trapped into incarnating himself. So he puts a little kicker in it and he sends the message back. All right I'm going to incarnate in such and such a village. You send somebody there and they have to be there for seven years and ten months before I'll go with them to have my training. So they pick the head of the sages from this guarded slope, and they send him down, and he picks out the house where the God Mahasena incarnates as the little baby Nagasena. And for seven years and ten months he goes every day to that house to beg. And of course they pay absolutely no attention to him at all. Are you a monk? You. And so, finally, after seven years and ten months, the woman of the house, the wealthy woman of the house, finally yells at him.

Why don't you go somewhere else? And the sage lightens up, gives a nice little gasho, and goes walking off a little more spry probably than he should have. And the old Brahmin sees this, and he goes up to him and he. And he says, how come you're looking so good? Did you get something from that house? Finally? And he, the monk, says, yes, I did, and he goes off. So the Brahmin goes back to the big mansion and he says to his wife, what did you give to that, that beggar? She said, I gave him nothing. So the old Brahmin thought, ah, I've caught him in a bold faced lie. And so the next morning, early, he's waiting at the road and here comes the monk. And so he runs out there in a costume, and he says, you told me you got something at that house there, and you didn't get anything at that house. Is it of your order to lie to people? And the monk says, what I got yesterday was permission never to come back. And that was really something. And the Brahmin falls down in his pride. He can't believe what is going on in this world. And he says, all right, a man like you is obviously got a lot of stick to itiveness, and a lot of subtlety will entrust the education of our boy Nagasena to you. And the monk, without mentioning it, says, all right, I guess I'll take that.

And so he takes Nagasena back to the guarded slope, and there they raise him. And because he's the god Mahasena. They don't mess around with preliminaries. They start him right off on the high Dharma, the Abhidharma, and they build him up so that he is a real fantastic. Uh uh. Critter use that worm. And in his old age, he's the one that's called by Melinda. And Melinda says, I've heard that you're pretty good. Why don't you have a seat here? And so he starts to lay into Nagasena, and they're going to talk about all kinds of things, and we don't have time to go into it. So if it's a let down to you, maybe next week I'll spend more time and and go into some of the questions that they talk about, which are very sophisticated. Incidentally, at the same time that the questions of King Milinda are being written between the Hellenistic and the Buddhist realm, the same Hellenistic and the Jewish realm are coming together in this letter of Aristeas. They're contemporaneous. It's the same civilization contact only on one end it's Buddhism, and on the other end it's Judaism. Very interesting, very interesting. The setting of this letter and the addition that I'm using that has it is the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament in English, R.H. Charles, Oxford University Press. It reads here the Epistle claims to be a contemporary record written with the personal knowledge of an eyewitness by Aristeas, an officer at the court of Ptolemy Philadelphus around 285 to 247 BC to his brother Philocrates or Philocrates, giving an account of the circumstances which led up to the composition of the Septuagint version of the Jewish law, and almost all of the legends, almost all of the traditional information of how the Old Testament got translated into Greek in Egypt comes from this letter of Aristeas.

There is no doubt in the world whatsoever that this letter is a phony. That is to say, it was not written in Ptolemy Philadelphus day, but it is totally legitimate for a first century BC Hellenistic Jew understanding the archetypal significance of what happened, just like the questions of King Milinda, are filled with archetypal significance because they're not interested in the humdrum political historical level. They're interested in the cosmic story. What is the big picture on all this? What is happening and where are we in that happening, and what are we supposed to do about it? And the letter of aristeas is like the questions of King Milinda. It is in the Grand sense, a portrait of spiritual man as of about 100 BC. The curious thing is, is that Judaism and Buddhism. Are linked together through the Greek gnosis. At this time, there is no way that Judaism and Buddhism have any other link to themselves. But they do have this corridor. It's almost like a soul corridor, linking them together through the Greek Hellenistic perception that there is a basic gnosis that human beings are capable of if they go inside themselves and draw it out.

Now the letter of Aristeas. Then is a letter from a man to his brother, and in the first part, after the dedication to his brother, there is a preliminary proceedings saying that so and so was the librarian. They named Demetrius Phalereus, who was not the librarian at the time, and they set up the conditions of Philadelphia's writing to Eliezer, who was the head priest at the temple in Jerusalem at the time, asking for a sufficient number of translators, and how Eliezer sent uh 72 translators, six from each of the 12 tribes. Why six from each of the 12 tribes? This is not just a prosaic thing. 12 tribes, 12 tribes. The Levites are in charge of the law. Why the 12 tribes? Why would you have anybody from the tribe of Asher or from Dan, of doing something about religious translation? That's not their purview at all. Or the or the tribe of Reuben. What is this? Remember that this is exactly the time when the Testaments of the 12 Patriarchs was brought out, and that the purpose was not to have the religious view from the houses or the tribes that were traditionally in charge of the Jewish law, but that this was a time of crisis where the entire population, the entire 12 tribes, had to be consulted because there was something that had to be visualized and envisioned, which couldn't be handled in terms of the tradition.

That is, not in terms of the tradition in which it was handed down, that the lineage from the priesthood was only sufficient to convey the law as it was, but not to reinterpret or restructure the law, and that something had happened where this was necessary. They had come to a juncture where the law had to be reinterpreted. It had been a long time since a prophet had been sent. And the tradition was, is that if you don't have a prophet in your time, save those questions until God sends a prophet. Don't let anybody make up or fudge the fact that he's a prophet. When God is ready, he will send a prophet. He always has. Well, there hadn't been a prophet in a very, very long time, couple hundred years, and the questions were accumulating and the situation was become attenuated. And remember, this is the period of the Maccabean revolt, the period of the Second Temple, the whole restructuring, the Second Temple. Well, we have rebuilt the temple. We will reconstruct the law then. And we need the 12 tribes to do this. The Septuagint, which is usually called the 70 Septuagint, means 70. The 70 in Greek is sort of a misnomer because there were 72 and 72, of course, very sacred number, because the 72 cycles is the coordination of the crown of um, of the mental order.

For instance, at um in Indonesia, Borobudur, the sacred mountain there, has 72 Buddhas arranged around in its terraces going up. And the the terraces are situated such that the Buddhas are, um, covered by bell shaped masonry. They're all like bells. And these 72 bells are not rung physically, but they're rung, uh, spiritually by resonance. And if you can't ring them, well, you can't go on that pilgrimage. And if you can ring them all, then you can get to the top of that mount. The letter of Aristeas goes into a description fully of the way in which Eliezer in Jerusalem, the high priest, is willing then to cull from the entire cross section of the Jewish people all 12 tribes, six of the best men versed in understanding life, so that the translation in Alexandria is not going to be a translation according to the old Hebrew tradition, but will be a reinterpretation of that tradition in terms of the whole people. It's a holistic rather than a traditional presentation of it. So the translation is going to be something different. And it was. We still don't quite get the picture, but the snapshot runs something like this, that Alexandrian spirituality changed the nature of every tradition that came into the city. They never went out the same way. And when Judaism came into Alexandria, it was changed irrevocably. Hellenistic Judaism is totally different from traditional Judaism. It's as different from traditional Judaism as the Mahayana is from traditional Buddhism.

And Hellenistic Judaism is very close to Mahayana Buddhism, very close indeed. You could have very interesting conversations and very interesting meditations together. Hellenistic, Jew and. Mahayana Buddhist, and about the only place where you could have had a conversation like that was in Alexandria. About the only place in the whole world that you could have had that kind of conversation, that kind of interplay. And they had that interplay for about 300 years. Before Jesus got there. And that's where he went. He went to Alexandria. There's a strong description of Jerusalem in here, just like there's a strong description of sagala, but it's an archetypal description. Like the description of Segala in here is that there is a central place in Segala, where the two main streets, which cut the city into quarters, come together, so that from that place a person sitting there can see all four gates of the four directions of the entire city. In other words, it's like a mandala. It's like a quaternary. The city is a cosmic person. The city is the cosmic amplification. A civilization is the amplification of man's mind into civilization wide. It's no longer a mind here for an individual, but a civilization is the mind of the people. And just like an individual can be enlightened, a civilization can be enlightened all at once, all together. That's called the Kingdom of God. That's what Jesus called it, and he meant it. And that was really radical.

It's radical now. It was out of sight when he said it. Almost nobody heard that, right. And those few that heard that right. They're wiping sweat off their brow, wondering, how are we going to do this? Because it seems like we're a long ways away from these conditions. We're having tough time having religious community of maybe 300, 400 people, and you're talking about millions of people. Well, we were left with that problem in the letter of Aristeas right at the beginning. He writes, since I have collected material for a memorable history of my visit to Eleazar, the high priest of the Jews, and because you, Philoctetes philocrates, as you lose no opportunity of reminding me, have set great store. Upon receiving an account of the motives and the object of my mission, I have attempted to draw up a very clear exposition of the matter for you. For I perceive that you possess a natural love of learning, a quality which is the highest possession of man, love of learning. It's called philosophia to be constantly attempting to add to his stock of knowledge and acquirements. What does a philosopher do? A philosopher loves wisdom. And what does a lover of wisdom do? He constantly adds to the stock of his knowledge and acquirements. Why? Why does he do this? Because in adding to this stock in the right way, it evokes a response out of him. And when you get to a certain critical piling up of information, it's like getting to a critical mass.

It will finally evoke what you want really most, and that's to know what it's all about. And that there's a flash point in this. And that's why the discipline goes on relentlessly. And that's why backsliding is always the worst thing of all. That's why not keeping up continuity is the only wrong thing to do. And keeping continuity is the only right thing to do, because you have to keep building towards some critical mass where that material gets rich enough, complex enough that you can no longer organize it by the mind, you can no longer keep control of it, and yet you know that it's got a whole meaning. And so you have to stop thinking of it in terms of the mind and commit the whole person to trying to understand it. And that brings out the spirit. And when the spirit is brought out like that, that's called a therapia. That's called a cure of the soul. Then man is no longer stuffed into a bag of flesh, then he's free. Then he's like a star. He shines through the whole universe. And so the letter of Aristeas. This is a Jew writing in Alexandria. I perceive that you possess a natural love of learning, a quality which is the highest possession of man, to be constantly attempting to add to his stock of knowledge and acquirements, whether through the study of history or by actually participating in the events themselves.

It is by this means, by taking up into itself the noblest elements, that the stole is established in purity, and having fixed its aim on piety, the noblest goal of all. It uses this as its infallible guide, and so acquires a definite purpose. And of course, this definite purpose is spiritual liberation. We have nothing else. Nothing else matters. Everything else is a raft. The questions of King Milinda and the letter of Aristeas are. Hellenistic phenomenon of about 100 BC, and from that time on, Judaism and Buddhism had a very strange kind of interpenetration. And increasingly in the first century BC, the Asean communities in the therapeutic communities developed this kind of very strange outlook. Next week, we'll fill in and we'll try to show why Jesus was really of the therapeutae and not of the Essenes, why he was really Alexandrian and not Jerusalem in orientation, and that this was the goad for the Jewish priesthood against Jesus, that he wasn't really one of us after all. He's one of them. He may be a cousin, but he's not of us, and he's trying to displace us. And he's got to go, because if he doesn't, we've got to go. And that was the whole issue. And when you can see it, I hope next week, in that light, it'll be very clear to you that Jesus is not a fiction at all, but a very real, poignant human being who actually did something. Well, we'd better leave off there. Otherwise we won't be able to drive home tonight.

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