Roots of Hellenistic World Religion

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Ancient Rome: Rome, Essenes, Alexandria, and the Book of Enoch
Presentation 43 of 54

Roots of Hellenistic World Religion
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, October 1, 1985

Transcript:

The date is Tuesday, October the 1st, 1985. I'm trying to understand a very important aspect of our own life. And I think that most of us have come to understand that one of the great discoveries in the 20th century, a whole world of images which express themselves in symbols and also express themselves in dramatic unfoldings, so that from time to time there are little events or little skits of events that we catch ourselves doing, and we realize that not all of them have come from this lifetime. That some of these skits have come from other times. And in fact, the empirical investigation of the mind of the psyche in our time has disclosed quite adequately over and over again from many different viewpoints, many different theoretical stances, that our consciousness has a substrata which is not accessible immediately to our minds, which has been called the unconscious simply, for lack of a better name. In Mahayana Buddhism it's called the alayavijnana, which means storehouse consciousness. It's like the warehouse of images and techniques that we have had to use to survive, to grow. And this unconscious is not at all a blur or a smear, but has a structure. And in fact, the structure of the unconscious is quite revelatory for us. And in fact, in the unconscious, there seem to be two deep streams, one of them fairly shallow, which from time to time becomes accessible to us in dream states, which is called the subconscious or the personal unconscious.

And there are even techniques of introspection which can put us into contact with the subconscious. A lot of modern art, the movements initiated by Kandinsky, abstract art or by Max Ernst, surrealistic art or stream of consciousness writing or automatic writing like we used to do with his wife. All of these techniques can make the personal subconscious accessible from time to time. But what seems to be almost impossible of access for consciousness is the really deep stream called the collective unconscious. And this collective unconscious. When it comes to the surface, comes in a force and a power that seems to overshadow us. The subconscious occurs to us as another dimension, as another realm. But the collective unconscious when it occurs and appears is like another universe. Everything is different. We do not have those archetypal images. They have us. And. The subconscious. Seems to have an imagery and an image base that is somehow related back about 600 years in the past. So that modern man, contemporary man ourselves has a late medieval or early Renaissance subconscious. But the deep archetypal level seems to go back farther. And we have discovered in this course. That this deep, archetypal level goes back about 2000 years, somewhere around 2100 years, to be precise. In fact, if you want to be really precise, as Plato was, it goes back 2160 years. The images of the collective unconscious occur exactly one great year back in the past, so that for any contemporaneous individual, in any time, one can find quite adequately that the collective images that fructify or terrify those individuals occurred one great year into the past, about 2160 years in the past.

So that when we're looking at figures at the time of Jesus, they're collective. Subconscious was influenced greatly by events around 4000 BC. And what events were there around 4000 BC? Well, if you look at the Old Testament, at the book of Genesis, one can compute that that was the creation of the world 4004 BC. So that when Jesus talks a lot about the New Testament, about the new realm, that the kingdom of God coming back again, he's talking in a collective, archetypal way, poignantly, and it takes us a while to get acclimated, to realize that the personal subconscious then, for those people would have been about 600 B.C. and what's happening about 600 BC is the first really great, powerful formations of nation states. The laws of Solon for Athens, the kingdom of Cyrus the Great in Persia, which took over Egypt at that time, so that the collective and the personal unconscious of people at the time of Jesus was dominated on a deep level by nation state, empire, law making, but on the deepest level by questions of universal genesis. We better let somebody in. So we're talking about the structure of the mind.

We're talking about how consciousness has a definite architecture, and that when one recognizes it's not on the basis of theory. Incidentally, this is confirmable one can go back and confirm this, verify it by investigation, by experience. One need not be a scholar and look through libraries of information. One can go to the empirical method of dream analysis of thousands of people. This has been done. Or one can go to a modern art, as I've talked about or many other ways. What has not been established before was that these patterns are extraordinarily apt, and that if we take a cue from them, we understand then that there is a tendency to pattern one's activity upon the personal subconscious, but at the same time an overwhelming need to put the content of the collective unconscious into that pattern. It was this criss cross of subconscious and unconscious energies that hit the Roman world around zero AD and completely scrambled the politics of the day. When we look at events of 60 BC, we see that the Roman world is dominated by strong individuals who want to take control, individuals like Julius Caesar, individuals like Pompeii. When we look at the Roman world in 60 AD, we see that all of the power individuals are completely helpless or completely frazzled and insane. People like Nero, people like Caligula. The contrast between Julius Caesar and Nero is the contrast between someone who is still in control of their mind, and someone who has been electrocuted by archetypal energy.

Julius Caesar wanted to be deified to rule the world from Rome. Nero burnt it down so he could make up a song. It's just that contrast. But right in the middle of the event, it zero ad is the kicker, because there we can find the beginnings and the culminations of these patterns. What we looked at last week, we're going to look at again this week with all of this in mind. And the basic theme is this. That starting around 20 AD, 30 AD, about the traditional time of the beginning of the teaching mission of Jesus. The collective unconscious energies were blended into a new kind of worldview that completely obviated political structure. It used the structure of personal experience, the individual human being and not the nation state, so that the archetypal energy was fed into the individual and not into the nation state. So instead of there being a world empire, there were cosmic people. And these people created a world religion and we are not told, we are never told that there was a world religion. And it takes a long time sifting through the evidence, putting two and two together. And literally it's that to begin to recognize that there was a single world religion in the second and third centuries AD, and that the key to this was the bringing together of the Jewish and the Buddhist traditions into the Hellenistic Greek language.

And it was the Hellenistic Greek person who received this balance of Jewish and Buddhist wisdom together, that fueled the transformation of the individual into a cosmic person. This seems extraordinary. It seems almost more incredible than someone talking about the lost continent of mu, even. But the fact is that we have the fossil evidence. It's still there. It just wasn't seen. It just wasn't recognized. We have two documents to look at tonight. We have one from the Buddhist tradition, which was translated into the Greek. We have one from the Jewish tradition, which was translated into the Greek. The Buddhist document is called the Questions of King Milinda. We're going to look at that. Milinda is the way the people in Ceylon pronounce Menander. He was a Greek king who died about 145 BC in northern India. And the Jewish document is the great letter of Aristeas, which dates from about 100 BC. So the letter of Aristeas, for those who have been coming for some time, is contemporaneous with the testaments of the 12 Patriarchs. And remember that the significance of the Testaments of the 12 Patriarchs was that instead of leaving the religious tradition in the hands of the Levites, or in the hands of the, uh, tribes, which were supposed to take care of religious matters, the tension of the religious understanding was distributed equally among all the 12 tribes, so that you had to have a whole cross section of the people.

And this emphasis upon the whole people is a key. It's a cue. It tells us that archetypal energy is beginning to work when the individual works, or even the individual who is enthused by the personal subconscious, they always look to, um, signs or symbols which are individual, which have to be put together. But when the collective energy comes, it comes in a ready made pattern. And what one is interested in is not little cues, not little signs, not little evidences, but one is interested only in patterns and especially patterns of wholeness. And this is a sign that archetypal energy is working, because that's all they're interested in at all. And so when the pattern of wholeness becomes increasingly the issue of concern, one can almost read into it that from this smoke the fires are burning, so that we know that around 100 B.C. in the Jewish psyche, the Hellenistic Jewish psyche, that definite beginnings of the need for patterns of wholeness were coming up almost wholesale. It was this movement that started the Asean movement, because the Asean communities were specifically designed to listen to these bubblings up from the deepest level. Specifically, they used the Book of Jubilees to give them some kind of an overall patterning of events. Remember, the Book of Jubilees goes on the seven times seven or the the cycle of 49, and then the 50th is the beginning of the new cycle.

And so every 50 becomes very interesting. But really it's like a seven times 749 is the sine wave and the 50th is the anniversary of it, or what they would call the Jubilee. Thus the Sabbath is a little epicycle. Well, in a seven day sequence, and the seventh Sabbath is the culmination of a larger epicycle. And that those larger epicycles then must culminate in even larger time structures, so that the Asean communities were made to investigate time line beings who occurred only in the nodes of these cycles. And it was the movement of the nodes of these cycles that they were trying to establish consciousness of. To see the overall pattern. To put it in colloquial terms, the Lord of history was stirring again and wanted something done. And man, always ready to do his bidding, was trying to listen hard to find out what it was. What do we need to do? And of course, the answer that they came up with by about 50 BC was that the whole structure of the world was being remade. The whole foundation of the reality of the world was being remade. Made. And that in order to remake it, the old structure was going to be dissolved. The foundations of reality of the world. We're going to be dissolved in order to make a new foundation of the world.

Because of the Hellenistic milieu, because of the emphasis on the individual. Because of the receptivity of the individual to all of these energies. The obvious thing was that there was going to be a God man who would remake the foundations of the world, a messiah. And the best thing for conscientious people was to get ready for this. This was the kind of movement that was going on at this time. In the letter of Aristeas, which comes from this time. It's written by a highly educated Alexandrian Jew. Written to his brother. And his brother is obviously very sophisticated also. And Aristaeus writing to his brother, um, who has the Greek name of um Philoctetes, says that he is going to give him in the letter a record of the events that happened in translating the Jewish scriptures into Greek, which was done at Alexandria roughly around 270 BC, in the reign of Ptolemy the second Ptolemy Philadelphus. In the letter, he tells his brother the events that surrounded, sending a deputation to Jerusalem that the high priest at the time was named Eleazar, and that Eleazar was a very powerful individual, and he describes the religious ceremonial costume of Eleazar, and these are some of the words that he used. We were greatly astonished when we saw Eleazar engaged in the ministration at the mode of his dress, and the majesty of his appearance.

His appearance is italicized because it's emphasized in the text. His appearance because remember, the archetypal energy now is on a person, it's on a human being. And the closer people are to the religious center of transformation, the more that charisma that they have. And so the description he's going to give of the high priest, Eleazar is of a numinous being. He's not just the high priest, he's the high priest at a high moment in the Lord of history's unfolding. So he describes him in this way. We were greatly astonished, he says, by his appearance, which was revealed in the robe which he wore, and the precious stones upon his person. They there were golden bells upon his garment, which reached down to his feet, and gave forth a peculiar kind of melody. Now this is a very shamanistic sound. When you hear a lot of little tinkling bells like that, the bells tinkle when you walk. And if you walk in a ritual way, there's an uncanny kind of a sense to that, a peculiar kind of melody. What is the melody? The melody is that if there weren't a ritual rhythm in the walking, it would be a random sound. But it is the purposeful religious movement that converts the random sound into a melody. The transformation into a collective unconscious order. And the high priest does this just by his walking, and on both sides of them, of these clusters of bells, where pomegranates, pomegranates with variegated flowers of a wonderful hue.

These are symbols of a of a new rebirth. Pomegranates. What is a pomegranate? You eat only the seeds. And the seeds are red. Blood red. These are the new seeds of something new. And the flowers? There's an exfoliation. All of this is symbolic language. He was girdled with a girdle of conspicuous beauty, woven in the most beautiful colors. A girdle of many colors. Joseph's coat of many colors is now tied around the waist. Why? Because he's he's going to work on these energies on his breast. He wore the Oracle of God, as it is called, on which 12 stones of different kinds were inset, fastened together with gold, containing the names of the leaders of the tribes according to their original order. You see, one has. When one's dealing with an archetypal pattern, one must get back to the original order. You have to figure out the exact right structure and where is it not on a sheet of paper. It's not on the drawing board. The time for drawing boards is over. It's on the chest of the high priest officiating. The energies are collected. Somebody is doing it. It's fantastic to talk about it, but it's unbelievable that somebody is now doing it. It's different. So they were fastened together with gold, containing the names of the leaders of the tribes according to their original order, each one flashing forth in an indescribable way its own particular color, so their glinting and flashing 12 different colors.

You see each one individual, but all together now on the chest of one man, and on his head he wore a tiara, as it is called, and upon this, in the middle of his forehead an inevitable turban, there was a royal diadem full of glory, with the name of God inscribed on it in sacred letters on the plate of gold. Having been judged worthy to wear these emblems in the ministrations, their appearance created such awe and confusion of mind. Why? Because its archetypal energy, the conscious mind, is dwarfed by this kind of inner landscape. It isn't the landscape of thought which one can then view, like with a microscope or a telescope. This is a pattern which comes all at once. This is why the word for spirit was rush, wind, holy wind. There's no way to make a form. It's there. I am convinced that anyone who takes part in the spectacle, which I have described, will be filled with astonishment and indescribable wonder, and be profoundly affected in his mind at the thought of the sanctity which is attached to each detail of the surface. What is this priest doing? What is Eliazar doing? He is not officiating in the temple for service. It is not a regular service. It is an extraordinary event that he is doing.

He is selecting out 72 elders from the 12 tribes to go to Alexandria to translate the Word of God into Greek. This is an epical earth shaking event. The foundations of the New World order are going to use the Greek language, not the Hebrew language are going to use the Greek language, but that the Greek language needs to be transformed because its syntax will not carry the meaning that it has to have its vocabulary is not quite, um, up to it yet. And so the translation of the Jewish wisdom into Greek is going to transform the Greek language into a spiritual language. So Eleazar is presiding over this transformative ceremony. It is a consecration of the language to send it off to Alexandria, to become a teacher. The language itself is going to become a teacher. And it's a symbolic, archetypal pattern that six members of each of the 12 tribes are chosen. It doesn't matter if there are seven scholars from the tribe of Benjamin who should go there, only six are going to go because we're not after a scholarly work, we're after an archetypally complete work, and therefore there must be six members from each of the 12 tribes making 72, and they are being sent by invitation from Ptolemy the second, direct from Eleazar. And so Jerusalem and Alexandria are coming together in terms of the language. Now, this actually happened in 280 BC, but the letter of Aristeas is being written 100 BC in Alexandria.

It's being written almost 200 years later, being written by somebody who is already. We have to use this firm. It's not a negative firm, somebody who is already inflated with the energies. He is not only inflated with the energies, but he is able to see and understand. And this is just the opening of the age. Remember in the letter of Aristeas, when he gets going, he says that this will transform the Greeks. He says the trouble with the Greeks is that they are foolish. He says it is foolish to suppose that anyone became a God in virtue of his inventions, for the inventors simply took certain objects already created, and by combining them together showed that they possessed a fresh utility. They already, uh. Rate is something, but they themselves did not create the substance of the thing. And so it is a vain and foolish thing for people to make gods of men like themselves. For in our times, there are many who are much more inventive and much more learned than the men of former days who they have deified. Now notice the emphasis. The Hellenistic Jewish emphasis is that a man will not become a god. The emphasis was that the community is holy. The 12 tribes together in their completed structure that is holy. It is the whole community in its symbolic pattern which is holy.

And so the Asean emphasis will always be and will never deviate from the fact that the community of the perfected is the vehicle by which the face of God will be seen, that the Teacher of righteousness in the Asean tradition teaches the community to be pure, but He Himself is not divine. But on the other hand, the Alexandrian has seen communities. The Therapeutae are just a little more Greek than they are Jewish, because they had a little bit of a Buddhist influence that tipped the scales, which was not there in the Jordan Valley by the Dead Sea, and in the therapeutic community north of Lake Marriotts or south of Lake Marriotts, just outside Alexandria. The emphasis would be that the purified community would focus its purity upon a individual, upon a person, and that person would manifest what was called in Greek the anthropos, the divinity of of God in a man. And so the advent of Jesus is an event which is made in Alexandria and not in Jerusalem. Jerusalem never bought it, never would not accept it. No. The community is holy. Yes. Perhaps even in a new way, yes, but not a single individual. Whereas the Alexandrian emphasis was that it always comes together in an individual, and you can raise the energies up to a universal level. There is always a person there because God is a person. It is the person who is holy and not the community.

The community is holy only by virtue of being a background to allow for the person to evolve. And so it will be a contest between the community and the person. The Christian Church, in its Roman Catholic version, will be a community structure, the Gnostic religion will be a personal transformation facility, and there will be totally different. And as time goes on, there will be a radical split. And by the second century AD it will be open, archetypal warfare. In the letter of Aristeas. He gets to a long section where there's a banquet very much like a Plato symposium. There's a banquet, a very large banquet with hundreds of people, and Ptolemy is present. Ptolemy Philadelphus and all of his wise Jewish translators. And so Ptolemy then, according to Aristaeus, taking an opportunity afforded by a pause in the banquet, the king asked the envoy who sat in the seat of honor, for they were arranged according to seniority. So among the 72, the oldest was in the seat of honor, and then so on and so on and so on. So he asked him a question. How could he keep his kingdom unimpaired to the end? After pondering for a moment, the wise Jew replied, you could best establish its security if you were to imitate the unceasing benignity of God. Very wise answer. For you exhibit clemency and inflict mild punishments upon those who deserve them in accordance with their deserts.

You will turn them from evil and lead them to repentance. So the King praised the answer, and then he turns to the next man. He asks a question, and this goes on until all 72 of the Jewish wise men have been asked a single question and received a single reply. And this goes on for most of the letter of Aristeas. Most of the letter is the questions of King Ptolemy, and those questions are about the same order of questions that the questions of King Milinda are about. What is the nature of reality? What are we doing here? How best can we do this? What is the ultimate meaning of this? Can we understand this? How can we prepare ourselves for these ultimate questions? The same technique in the letter of Aristeas is here in the questions of King Milinda, and the questions of King Milinda was written about the same time. We don't have the original anymore. Almost nobody is willing to say it, but I'll say it. I think the original was in Greek. It was translated very early into what was called Magadhi. Magadhi was the language that the Buddha spoke. Magadhi was a kind of a middle learned Sanskrit, sort of like what English and America would be to English. In England. That kind of relationship to Sanskrit. Pali is the southern pronunciation of magadhi. We don't have the Magadhi translation, we don't have the original, but we have two different translations of the questions of King Milinda.

One of them is world famous and is from Sri Lanka, but the other one, which almost nobody talks about is Chinese. And in fact, upon really close inspection. A couple of scholars in India have proved irrefutably that the Chinese version is before the one in Ceylon. Quite a long time before maybe 100 years, maybe more. The questions of King Milinda, in fact, in the Chinese version, show a remarkable similarity to the questions of Aristeas. It is a wise Greek king who is interrogating the wisest men of another religion as to the nature of reality, using a Greek mind and a Greek dialogue form and a Greek Socratic technique. But the content is all from the other person. Ptolemy Soter is learning a Jewish content. Content. King Menander is learning a Buddhist content, and it's happening at the same time. And these Jewish and Buddhist contents are coming into a Greek mental structure, into a Greek language form, the dialogue form, the interrogation by the royal leader, the king of the wise man. This in itself was set up in archetypal form. So that 600 years in the future from 100 B.C.. The personal subconscious form of the king and the wise men, being the transforming duo in history, will manifest itself as Merlin and King Arthur. The King and the Wise Men are an unbeatable combination.

Why? Because the whole situation was made at this time and at the right time in the future. It works magically because people at that time don't understand. To them, it's unbelievable magic. How can this work? What's going on? And the high drama is like magic until you understand. And then it's understandable. Then it isn't just magical, but it's unbelievable wonderment in the questions of King Milinda. And we'll turn to that now. Many of you were charmed last time. I'm sorry. I don't have a lot of time to go into some of these charming details, but you can read it for yourself. Dover Paperbacks has it in two volumes. Remember now that the The Wise Men is named Nagasena and Naga, it means snake serpent. He has the wisdom of the underground, of the undercurrents of the subconscious, of the archetypal collective. The Naga king. The serpent king. Nagasena comes in and he is the only one who can talk to King Menander. Menander has driven all the other wise men from his kingdom by his incessant questioning. He will not leave them alone, and he argues, until they run out of steam, or they run out of answers. And then he dismisses them, and he says, my kingdom is empty of wisdom. Nobody here knows. And so the sages and the Himalayas have sent for a figure from the gods to teach Menander a little humility before he can go to Menander, though, there's an archetypal movement that has to be fulfilled.

Nagasena. Is put into a position where he has to teach an old woman the High Dharma. Why is this so difficult? Why is this such a challenge? Because an old woman has the habits of a lifetime. And if she doesn't know the high Dharma, it's almost impossible at that time to have it taught. And so it's a test of nagashima's excellence. Can you do this? And not only does he do this for her, but at the same time it brings out and hones to the nth degree his own capacity. The lady said to Nagasena, I am old friend. Nagasena you wish to give thanksgiving, let the thanksgiving be from the deeper things of the faith and Nagasena in pronouncing the thanksgiving discourse dwelt in the profounder side of the Abhidharma, not on matters of mere ordinary morality, but on those relating to Nirvana. And as the lady sat there listening, there arose in her heart the insight into the truth clear, stainless, which perceives that whatsoever has beginning, that has the inherent quality of passing away, whatever has a beginning will also pass away. Conversely, what has no beginning cannot pass away what has no beginning. And then nagasena goes into that. And Nagasena also, when he had concluded that Thanksgiving discourse felt the force of the truths he himself had preached, and he to then arrived at insight, he too entered as he sat there upon the stream.

That is to say, upon the first stage of the excellent way to Nirvana, the stream in Pali is called Sotapanna stream. Winner. The first step to enlightenment is getting in touch with the stream. Like the stream of the subconscious of learning that what's going on in your life is not just mundane, and it's not just a political structure. It's not just a social structure, not just an individual structure, but that there's an energy flow 600 years old all the time, which is also here all the time in present, and that it crops up largely in feelings, largely in intuitions, largely in the dream states, largely in our affinities with things and people. That we find inexplicable joy in certain individuals and in certain events and certain types of things, which we have to think about a long time and live a long time in life. And only in retrospect do we see why that was so important to us, why those people were so important to us, and yet we felt that that was right. Because this is the stream. You see the deep stream, the subconscious stream. Getting in touch with that stream is a stream winner, and that's the first stage to enlightenment. Without that, nothing can be done. Fancy machines here. If they start to levitate the desk, I quit talking, all right. I've been through all that.

I swept through.

That are in the questions of King Milinda. What is interesting is that what is emphasized about Nagasena is that he not only knows the Buddhist tradition, but that he also knows the Vedic rituals by heart. Now the Pali, the the Pali version from Sri Lanka always underplays this. They never talk about this. In fact, they always make little notations of saying. This is a colloquial of saying that he knew a lot. It is not a colloquial way of saying that he knew a lot. They mean exactly what was written there, because the Rigvedic traditions go back about 2100 years from Nagashima's time, which meant that he was in contact not only with the stream, but with the deeper whole patterns of the collective archetypes also. And he knew the Rigvedic ritual perfectly, and that's a way of saying that he was deep like this. And that's why, at the beginning of the questions of King Milinda, it is said that Milinda was wise like a huge river, like the Ganges, but that Nagasena was wise, like the ocean. And no matter how big a river gets, it's nothing compared to the ocean. The ocean, in fact, the the phrase in Bhakti yoga is always ocean of nectar. It's the ocean of nectar. It's that incredibly deep level which is not a stream, but is an ocean. And it's that oceanic ness that the spirit wakes up to the mind with its organization finally, based upon an equilibrium of the four functions, can get in contact with the stream.

It can just barely stretch itself in wholesomeness and contact the stream. But only the spirit is free to go to the ocean. The mind can't do that. The ordinary, mundane life. It balks at the stream. It's just overwhelmed by the ocean. This is what mystics always say. Neti, neti. It's not this. It's not that. They speak in negatives of the ocean. So nagasena is like an ocean then. And he brings this oceanic ness to Melinda. Melinda has the Greek mind. He is incredible at interrogating and asking questions. He refines everything constantly. But the refinement is always on the basis of polarity. And of argument based upon differentiation on the kind of logic which uses identity and opposites, and Nagasena constantly is transforming Melinda's questions from that realm into the realm of wholesomeness, and the technique that he uses is that he changes the logical query of Melinda into an answer, which is given in terms of a simile or a parable. And this is the time honored teaching technique of wholesomeness, that one takes the logical question and gives an answer in terms of a parable and nagasena, just like the Jewish wise men in the letter of Aristeas use the simile parable form because they never give an answer in terms of the logic that would only fortify the mind's illusion, but always translating it, and this would become the technique.

This is why Jesus always used parables in teaching. He says. For instance, the king said, when you say that, the ultimate point is not apparent, what do you mean by ultimate point? Nagasena replies of whatsoever time is past, it is the ultimate point of that oh king that I speak of. But if so, when you say that it is not apparent, do you mean to say that of everything is the ultimate point of everything unknown? Partly so, and partly not? Do you see how he parries it then? Which is so, and which not formerly, O King? Everything in every form, everything and every mode was ignorance. It is to us as if it were not in reference to that the ultimate beginning is unknown, but that which has not been becomes as soon as it has begun to become, it dissolves away again. In reference to that the ultimate beginning is known. This is very, very interesting because if you can follow that kind of speech and it takes a while to get used to it, Nagasena is transforming the logical syntax of Melinda's mind into a different form. If I hold my hands like this in a polarity like this, there's a tension between them. One can say that there's a visual tension and you can increase it, decrease it by moving the hands.

This is like a logical form. If I shift and bring the hands together like this, then the tension of the polarity has been transformed because the polarity becomes a complementarity. And later on, one can even do that with prayer, bringing the palms together so they touch. The tension is increased to a vanishing point. And so the prayer with the hands like this is a sign of unity, of no polarity, of being in touch with the oceanic, not in touch with the mind in terms of its workings and structure. Nagasena and the Jewish wisemen both used these techniques to educate the Greeks, to tell the Greeks that this is a different content than one that you've been used to. It's not the same. They tell, um Ptolemy that the Law of Moses is not a mythology. We're not talking about a bigger Zeus. We're talking about difference. We're talking about one God, not a king of gods or some god who's going to be a king of king of gods. Yahweh is not any kind of a mythic figure at all. And nagasena the same way as telling Menander that this is peculiar. Melinda, this is very peculiar. You keep asking questions to get answers, and I keep showing you that the questions are naive, and even if they were answered, the answers would be naive.

And finally, Menander catches on. He catches this. And one of the transforming points is when they talk about the soul. Because all the time the Greek mind or the mind which understands that polarity is viable, bases itself upon saying in some theological way that there is a person within the person, that there is a soul within the person, and that that's the unifier. And as long as that person within the person is emphasized, there is no chance to turn the polarity into a complementarity, because that person within the person becomes like a meta person. The soul becomes like a meta person or an ego, and from that stance, polarity can never transform itself. And so the way around that, it's like an end run, the end run around that is to demonstrate that there is no need to conceive of a soul in order to have the integrity of reality in a person. This is difficult. This is how it goes in the questions of King Milinda. Then these powers are not united to one another indiscriminately. The powers of sight. The powers of hearing. The powers of touch. So on. Now we, as we are seated here in the palace, with all these windows thrown open in full daylight. If we only stretch forth our heads, we see all kinds of objects. Plainly. Can the living principle do the same when the doors of the eyes are thrown open? When the doors of the ear are thrown open, can it do so? Can it then not only hear sounds, but see sights, experience, tastes, smell, odors, feel, touch, discern conditions, and so with each of its windows.

And the reply from Ananda is no, sir, then these powers are not united one to another indiscriminately. Now again, great King, if Dina were here, were to go outside and stand in the gateway, would you be aware that he had done so? Yes, I should know it. And if the same Dina were to come back again and stand before you, would you be aware of his having done so? Yes, I should know it. Do you see how Socratic it is? This is a Buddhist sacred book. It's written just like a Socratic dialogue. Why? Because they were Greeks. They were Greek Buddhists. That's what they were. They were Greek Buddhists. Well, great King, would the living principle within discern and like matter, if anything possessing flavor were laid upon the tongue, its sourness, or its saltiness, its acidity, or its pungency, or astringency, or even sweetness? Yes, I would know it. But when the flavor has passed into the stomach, would it still discern these things? Certainly not. Then these powers are not united, one to the other indiscriminately. Now suppose, O King, a man were to have 100 vessels of honey brought and poured into one trough, and then, having had another man's mouth closed over and tied up, were to have him cast into the trough full of honey.

Would he know whether that into which he had been thrown was sweet, or whether it was not? No, sir. But why not? Because the honey could not get into his mouth. Then, great King, these powers are not united to one another indiscriminately. The point that he's getting across is that there is a structure, always a structure to the mind. The mind always has a structure. It's never indiscriminate. It's always discriminant. But what the mind cannot ever sense in its structure is the wholesomeness of its whole ness. Its entirety cannot occur to itself because it has no organ to sense that. And so the very thing that's missing is the sense of the reality of the whole, the one thing that's missing from the mind. It cannot cognize itself as a whole, is virtually impossible because of its discriminate structure. Therefore, man has to learn to depend not on the mind to sense reality, but something else, something else called the spirit. In Chinese it's called the Shen. You hear all these New Age people talking about the qi? Well, the qi ain't nothing without the Shen. I said that like Fred Astaire. Getting glib. Getting time to quit.

You got a new pair of shoes on television yesterday. Fred did? Yeah.

Nagasena goes on in this way, and I don't have time to get to all of it today. But the basic thing that comes through is that Nagasena shows Menander that as long as he has a concept of the soul, he will not have a sense of reality because his concept of the soul must exist in his mind. No matter how exalted the concept is, it can only exist in his mind, and it keeps him habituated to a mental structure, a mental structure which by its very design and nature, cannot sense the truth of reality, so that when one becomes energized by archetypal energy where you have to know what is real, if you depend upon the mind, you can never know what is real by design. And so you get caught in an intolerable bind, where the tensions and the anxieties become asymptotic and madness and death and everything occurs because one is addicted to trying to sense with the mind that which cannot be sensed with the mind and the cornerstone. And the whole thing is the idea that there's some transcendental. Metaphysical person within the person who really secretly is handling it all. And this is the problem, and this is the problem which the Jewish wisdom tradition specifically says is wrong with man, that it becomes inflated when he thinks that someone is God, that some one person embodies the divine.

This is exactly what is evil, and it doesn't matter how much this person deserves it or manifests, it is exactly this which is wrong, because the high Jewish wisdom is that no body is divine, only God is divine. The very high Buddhist wisdom was exactly that of the Old Testament, that there was no registry whatsoever of the divine. But Hellenistic Judaism focused itself increasingly upon the community, and increasingly came very close to seeing a messianic figure who embodied in a mysterious way, the ineffable, so that the person was not a person in the human sense, but was a divinity, a transcendental divinity who had no limitations whatsoever. This was only possible in Hellenistic Judaism because of the development and rise at the same time of the Mahayana. The great vehicle in Buddhism and the Mahayana was only possible because of the balance of the Hellenistic Jewish wisdom. And so you had rising at the very same time in the Greek character, in the Greek mind, all through the first century BC, right up to the time of Jesus, the incredible push volcanic energies from the collective unconscious, incredible streams from the subconscious and then individual events and all of this mounted together and came to a focus, which was an incredible event, because in Buddhism, there was a prophecy from the Buddha that 500 years after his parinirvana, they don't call it his death.

500 years after his parinirvana would come the Maitreya, the next Buddha, the Buddha of love. The historical Buddha died in 480 BC. That prophecy would have come due about 20 A.D. well, you can see that the situation was just made to order on the deepest, most profound levels that reality is capable of of pulling the nature of man inside out. And that's exactly what happened. And what came out of that was a world religion, a single world religion with incredible complexity and credible scintillation. And we'll see next time why most of the people in the world could not accept it, and fled into covering up and obscuring the white hot brilliance of this jewel like perception, and made out of it all of the staid religious forms that have grown so stale in our time that it's even disgusting to to think that people are still trying to live decent and meaningful lives in these junkyards. About a dozen major religions were made as not religions, but theologies, doctrinaire bureaucracies which have been strangling people ever since they were made. So we'll look at that next time, and we'll try not to be so violent in our language. Thank you.

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