Secret Gospel of Philip

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Ancient Rome: Rome, Essenes, Alexandria, and the Book of Enoch
Presentation 47 of 54

Secret Gospel of Philip
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, October 29, 1985

Transcript:

This is the lecture that was delivered by Roger Ware at the Whirling Rainbow School on October 30th, 1985. I see that some people are are new, and some haven't been here long enough to appreciate that this is an ongoing continuity. We've been trying to investigate all year. On Tuesday night, in a exploring kind of a way, the significance of ancient, archetypal Alexandria. And we've gotten sidetracked from time to time during the year. One issue that came up was trying to understand the difference between Greek and Roman characters. And we found that the Greek character is always tending to be individual, and the Roman character is always tending to be collective. So that Romans love rules and Greeks love adventure, that sort of thing. For the last two months, we've been skirting closer and closer to the figure, the personality, the person of Jesus. And we have quite a few times found, startlingly, that the spectrum of his achievement exceeds all estimates that we have inherited a rather naive view of what actually has occurred, and that only by understanding the character and the person and the achievement of Jesus from an Alexandrian standpoint, are we able to come into the shift from the BC era to the A.D. era? For about six weeks, several months ago, we spent time on the Book of Enoch, which was a Jewish work written around 180 BC and was a culmination of the whole prophetic tradition in Judaism that, aside from the mosaic period, the Torah, the law, and aside from an early period of kings, there was a period of prophets.

Traditionally, in Judaism, Moses was the first prophet, and so the prophetic tradition takes off from him. But if you recall, Moses passed the prophetic tradition in a transformed way onto Aaron, so that the religious codification of the prophetic utterances were what became Judaism became the law, and the law became increasingly dependent upon precedent, upon a logical form, upon a theological coherence. By the time of the first kingship, at the time of David, the law had proved ineffectual in covering all human exigencies. That is to say, there were qualities of life that were not adequately taken care of in the law, or rather, we should say they were adequately taken care of in the law. But that human nature had evolved and had changed. And this is something we're going to look at tonight in depth. It meant that at the time of King David, there had to be a sacred individual who stepped outside of the precedent of the law and who introduced additional material, additional revelatory material. And that first individual was Samuel. And Samuel is a very great figure in human history, and it is Samuel who legitimizes the kingship in Jewish history. He is the one. He is the Merlin to David. Think of David as like King Arthur. Well, Samuel was the Merlin. He was the magician in the prophetic tradition who stepped outside of the Torah, recognizing that there was something flawed in human nature that had not been there at the time of Moses, but now was there and had to be tended.

There's just enough time between Moses and David for things to go astray, and it's a paradigm for what ails our time, and it's a paradigm for what was the problem that Jesus faced in his time. The paradigm is this that our personage, our personality, our being. Our character, who we are. Is not purely energized by current conditions, but that we have roots in life. We have roots in consciousness. We have roots in nature. And the colloquial terms these days is to call those archetypal roots that archetypal energies feed us and nourish us. The heritage of the human race, the heritage of the human race in terms of the build up of instincts, the build up of, of achievements, of previous levels of consciousness. All of this is an inheritance for us. But that archetypal level is deep. We've discussed how it goes back about 21 or 2200 years in its most recent formation. The archetypes are eternal, but their latest formulation is the one that affects us personally. But the effect is not immediate. It's not direct. It's mediated. It's mediated. But by what we call in the same horizon as using the terms archetype by what we call the subconscious, the subconscious.

Jung sometimes calls us the personal unconscious. Subconscious is better. The subconscious is a stream, much like the archetypal level is an ocean, and the subconscious is a lens. Think of it as a lens which focuses the energies from the archetypal level onto the person. Without the lens, there would be no way we would drown in the ocean of the archetypal energies. Now, if that lens of the subconscious is flawed, if it's fractured, if it's not in focus, then it works. Come on in. There's a chair right over here. We just got started. Come on over and and join us. Have a seat. Great. Thank you. Sure. Great. We're talking about different levels of experience. We don't have time to go into all of the details, but the person is energized by these deep oceanic archetypal levels. And those energies are focused by the subconscious as if it were a lens. And when that stream of subconsciousness is whole, it's rather like a circle. It's annealed into a unity, it's a circle. And the energies from the archetypal level focus through an integrated subconscious focus on the person in a positive way. It's life giving. It's affirmative. One can grow, there's joy. But when the subconscious is fractured, when it's injured, when it's damaged, those archetypal energies. Come in a negative form and the personalities become diseased. The people become corrupt and they are, as one would say, are possessed by demonic tones. And instead of joy, they seek euphoria instead.

And for euphoria, one must make up fictions. One must make up fictions for the body like drugs, or make up fictions for the mind like fantasies. The list is endless, but you get the point. By Jesus time, as in David's time before him, the subconscious had become fractured to a point that the negative energies from the archetypal levels were catastrophic. There was no way to deal with it except for radical surgery. There was no way to deal with it on a personal level, and there was no need to go down to. The subconscious levels without going even further to the archetypal levels. But the problem became exacerbated. Because all of the world culture by that time had come under the aegis of the Hellenistic Roman Empire, and there were very few civilized places within the reach of human beings that they could see outside of the context that they were in. And so the madness, the spiritual demonic madness began to haunt the populations of the world at that time. We see the evidence everywhere that we look in the literature, the art of that time. One of the most poignant documents of that time, showing the disease state of the person, and hence the fractured state of the subconscious, is the book of revelation in. And the Book of Revelation, usually put last in the New Testament, actually occurs as a bridge between the old and the New Testament.

Modern research has shown that the work actually comes from the era just around the time of Jesus's mission. In the Book of Revelation, there are 22 chapters. And most of you are familiar enough with it to see that it's very difficult to read this, very difficult to understand. The Book of Revelation is a welling up of archetypal energy. The imagery that comes from it comes through a vision of a new unification of the subconscious. And when one sees a pattern of wholeness like this, the way to understand it is not to go to the beginning, but to go to the middle. Wherever there is wholeness, one goes to the middle. This is the spiritual sight as opposed to the psychological understanding. When you look at a human being spiritually, you look at their center, not at the, uh, latest cue, which is what is happening now. That would be starting at the beginning. And one can do that. And psychologically, it's revelatory if you can follow it long enough. But spiritually, one looks at the center and this usually reveals the pattern. When we look at the center of revelation, the very center of it is the beginning of chapter 12. Notice how this reads, and a great sign appeared in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun and the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of 12 stars. And she is with child. And cries out in her pangs of birth.

And is in anguish to bring forth. This is quite an image. This is an extraordinary image. It's an image of a pregnant woman. But the woman is archetypal. She is not personal. She comes from beyond and in the middle of revelation. Her appearance is extraordinary. Now, what comes before this in the first half of revelation, actually is in two parts. The very beginning of revelation, if we go there, we find that the book begins a revelation concerning Jesus Christ, which God entrusted to him to disclose to his servants the events which are destined to happen soon. Indeed, by sending it through his angel, he has given a sign of this beforehand to his servant John, who has borne witness to the word of God, namely the witness concerning Jesus Christ, all that he saw. Blessed is he who reads, and those who listen to the words of this prophecy, and observe what is written in it. For the critical time is near. Now the John of this beginning of revelation is Saint John the Apostle. But this opening takes us only to chapter the end of chapter three. In chapter four of revelation starts a different part, so that the first three chapters of revelation are by Saint John, but chapters 4 to 11 are by a different John. They are by John the Baptist, and John the Baptist begins his testimony in a different way.

After these things I looked, and behold, an open door in the heaven, and the first voice, like a trumpet, which I heard, spoke to me, saying, come up here, and I will show you what must happen after these things. Immediately I was in the spirit, and behold, a throne was set in heaven, and there was one seated on the throne. And he who sat there was like the appearance of jasper and carnelian. And there was a bow around the throne, which was like the appearance of emerald. And what follows is the heavenly vision, the assumption of John the Baptist in vision, in the spirit of what he sees. It is only after the introduction of Saint John and after the vision in heaven of John the Baptist, that the vision of the divine pregnant woman descends to earth with all of her archetypal energy. The person of Saint John is acting as a personality upon whom all this is going to focus. The visionary quality of John the Baptist is going into the subconscious level to make sure that the lens of perception is whole and clean and pure. And then the second half of revelation is the archetypal revelation that comes through that prism of John the Baptist to the person of Saint John. Without understanding this structure, the Book of Revelation leads people astray into all kinds of fictions and does no good. In fact, it does damage by promoting a private fictive realms rather than disclosing the spiritual accuracy of the event.

We in our time have to learn because we are in very similar conditions today. Our subconscious is so badly fractured that all of the energies that we are receiving now, almost all of them, are negative, and thus the chance of becoming a whole person in our time is approaching nil. It is impossible to see any further into revelation unless we backtrack. We have to backtrack a little bit, and next week we're going to come back to revelation and take off where we got to tonight. But now in our backtracking, we have to come back and try to understand something very important, which we brought out last week. There was a great meeting at a place called Sutum. It's called Nablus today it's in Samaria, the middle province of Israel. There's Judea, Samaria, Galilee, Nablus or Shechem is inland. It's in the mountains. And it was a historic place. It's the place where Abraham's caravans stopped. His caravan spanned the Fertile Crescent, and his caravan stopped at this well. Deep well, fresh water, well, etc. it was later called Jacob's Well, and even to this day it's called Jacob's Well. And it was the first thing that was owned in the Holy Land. It's the first thing that the Hebrew people bought and that was owned as a property. It was the taproot. In other words, this deep well, it's not on the surface.

It's a huge cave, like, uh, uh, depression going down and then tunneling and so forth. And the well is way down at the bottom. It is the taproot of the entire Jewish tradition. And not only is it Jacob's Well, but there is an old tree that was there in ancient biblical times, Old Testament times. And that ancient tree was the spot that Joshua gathered the people of Israel when he was old, and spoke to them, sort of like the last state of the Union message that they would have to stay together as a people, that there was no way that the tradition would survive if it were fragmented. And then a great stone was put under this tree, marking Joshua's exhortation to the people to be one. And thus the most holy cry in the Jewish tradition is Hero Israel. The Lord thy God is one. Meaning here and be one people, for it is one God, and be one with that God. Another aspect of Shechem which sanctified it even further was that when Joseph died in Egypt, his body was brought out of Egypt and buried there in Saksham, so that this place is one of the most holy sites, and in a way is the esoteric holy site of Judaism. More holy than Jerusalem, because Jerusalem is holy in terms of the headlines, in terms of the religious, the theology. But Shechem is the esoteric taproot of the reality behind the whole tradition.

So when the crucifixion happened and the resurrection happened, and the disciples were sent out to go to various places, they were, uh, had been collected and powered and energized. The 12 disciples had been formed as if they were the subconscious of the New Age, and Jesus had honed them into a unity. But one of the disciples had deflected so that the new lens was already deflected. The Christian church, built upon that basis has had a deflection in it all this time. The deflection came from doubt, from a seed of doubt. The lack of capacity to believe that all of this is true, for one, is hard pressed if one must believe that it is true. But if one has the spiritual experience, one simply understands that it is true. It's not a question of belief at all. This flaw became apparent at Sutum within about five years of the death and resurrection of Jesus. The apostle who was sent to Sutum sent to Samaria was Philip the apostle Philip. And when he got to Sutum. And began performing healing the miracles of bringing people back from being crippled, casting out demons, getting rid of their possession. The word spread throughout Samaria, and the archetypal great magician of the day lived in Samaria and went to Sutum to try and learn from Philip the new tricks of the trade. His name was Simon Magus, and Simon Magus is very much like the archetypal amplification of Judas.

Philip, understanding the poignancy of the situation that he was in a conjunction with Simon Magus there at this holy ground, sent word to Jerusalem, and the two major apostles, Saint Peter and Saint John, both went up to him to join Philip in Simon Magus, and four of the most powerful figures of the age met together in session. This was a dramatic confrontation, and the confrontation was between Simon Magus and Simon Peter. Two Simon's and Philip and John were the balance points in this horizon of confrontation. It was like Philip was the understanding of midsummer, and Saint John was the understanding of midwinter, and that Simon Magus as the Halloween and Peter as the Easter vying equinox with each other. And Simon Magus tried to buy the secret of casting out demons and healing with money. And we read last week from acts where Simon Peter says, cursed be you for all time for offering money to buy this. And Simon Magus cleverly saying, Pray to Jesus that such things will not happen to me. Twisting it and turning it around as a clever individual one. Because of this confrontation, the magic that Simon Magus represented was progressively weeded out of the Christian church and displaced by theological doctrine, so that the law returned again, so that one had again precedent and not presence. And we inherit today a upside down condition where the Christian dispensation has been almost purely legalized, and the presence of spiritual transformation all but suffocated out.

But the message of Jesus is very clear. And rather esoteric and like all elements of reality, tending constantly towards consciousness, never able to be squelched. Life is weighted towards consciousness in our time. The document unedited by subsequent church histories The Gospel According to Philip, has surfaced surfaced with the Nahj Hammadi material right after the Second World War, which was as much of an apocalyptic event as any that have ever happened in human history. In the Gospel According to Philip, we have at long last the balance for the Gospel of John. The Gospel of John concerns the function of light, and the Gospel of Philip concerns the function of life. And with Philip and John, those two gospels, we finally have the correct balance that we can see what happened between the church in its theological meaning and the magic in its non-spiritual element, and how they have warred with each other and have been unable to be resolved and brought into focus until now. Now we have a chance in our time to at last understand and bring into focus. The Gospel of Philip, then, is something that we have to look at in order to understand this quaternary very powerfully. Right at the beginning of the new dispensation, and understand that the flawed element that was there was seen and understood and was understood in such a way that very conscientious people prepared a word of mouth tradition to go outside of the church, so that that would carry on through time, through human history, so that there would be a chance to have always a few individuals who were free, who lived by presence, rather than who were planning by precedent.

So that spiritual transformation became esoteric, occulted, hidden from that time onward. And of course, elements in the church always have struggled to keep the presence there. And there have been times where that welled up so strongly that the church had to incorporate some of these elements. They're largely called mystics or mysticism in the Christian church. And of course, the great welling up of mysticism in the Christian Church came in the 1200s, the 13th century, which is exactly far enough distant enough from us in time to be the stream of consciousness imagery which we are having to work with today. And in a way, the problem of 20th century man is that he has no mystical experience. For if he had mystical experience, he would be able to recover his stream of consciousness image base focused that lens and turn that archetypal negative barrage of energy into a positive barrage and be able then to achieve individuation as a personality. None of this was understandable. None of this was visible until, paradoxically, the Gospel of Philip was found with the Nag Hammadi material about 40 years ago. But it's only been just a few years that it's been available in translation.

Let's look at the Gospel of Philip. And as we look at it, we keep in mind that the central figure coming down to earth from heaven, or if you like, coming archetypally up to the personal, is that of a pregnant woman who is clothed with the sun, who has a moon at her feet, and who has a crown on her head of 12 stars. This is the central image in the mystery, and the Gospel of Philip has life for its theme. Just as the Gospel of Saint John is the gospel of light. The spiritual, transformative veracity of light. Philip deals with the imminence of life coming into a marriage situation between men and women, and saying that there is such a thing as a spiritual marriage and that the place, the focus for that spiritual marriage is what he will call the bridal chamber, the bridal chamber. The Gospel of Philip is all about the mysteries of the spiritual marriage in the bridal chamber. How do we know that we are not making this up? How do we know that we are not being disingenuous? Because we can check it just as if it were an architectural structural map and design, because we can look back to the Christian mystics and see in the subconscious era about 600 years ago, that this was the constant theme of the mystics. And in fact, if you want to look for yourself, one of the most poignant mystics was John of Ruysbroeck, who was a Flemish mystic, and his great mystical work is called the Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage, and it shows the complete accuracy of mystical vision in man that without any information, without any background whatsoever, that man mystically may attune himself to the exact, precise truth which gives us confidence for the future.

Even if we sent out descendants to some far off star system in some kind of technological spaceship, they would be able to have someone at some time, completely surrounded by machinery, come to a spiritual understanding of the reality of the nature of everything. The light is never lost, even though the darkness seems infinite. So, Philip, then the Gospel of Philip begins with a series of statements. The first one is a Hebrew makes another Hebrew, and such a person is called proselytized. But a proselyte does not make another proselytize. But some both exist just as they are and make others like themselves, while others simply exist. The slave seeks only to be free, but he does not hope to acquire the estate of his master. But the son is not only a son, but lays claim to the inheritance of the father. Those who are heirs to the dead are themselves dead, and they inherit the dead. Those who are heirs to what is living are alive, and they are heirs to both what is living and the dead.

The dead are heirs to nothing. For how can he who is dead inherit? If he who is, is dead inherits what is living, he will not die, but he who is dead will live even more. And then he begins to work with this heavily polarized imagery. When we were Hebrews, we were orphans and had only our mother. But when we became Christians, we had both father and mother. Balance. Those who sow in winter, reap in summer, balance the opposites in balance. Let us so in the world that we may reap in the summer. Because of this, it is fitting for us not to pray in winter. Summer follows winter. But if a man may reap in winter, he will not actually reap, but only pluck out, since this sort of thing will not provide him a harvest, it is not only now that the fruit will not come forth, but also on the Sabbath. His field is barren. In order to reap you have to plant. And if you're thinking that you can reap any time, you're misunderstanding the nature of reality that you have to plant before you can harvest, that if you try to reap in winter time, you're going against the grain of what can be that reaping is in summertime. So this is an interesting play that Philip opens up with, and he's trying to show that only when the polarities work together.

Is there anything called growth. Is there any chance for a seed to become a fruit. And he's going to say the most primordial image of this is a man and a woman, that men and women have to learn that they together form a primordial coordinate of reality which cannot be displaced or replaced, that life to flower is dependent upon this condition, not because someone wants to make it be so, but because it is. Here's how Philip talks, then. Light and darkness, life and death. Right and left are brothers of one another. They are inseparable. Because of this, neither are the good good nor the evil evil. Nor is life, life, nor death death. For this reason, each one will dissolve into its original nature. But those who are exalted above the world are indissoluble, eternal. So Philip is giving us an insight into how reality is manifested and reality is manifested. When the planting is done in season and the growth is done according to real pattern, then the fruit will come. Whether you believe it or not, it's not a question of belief, but then it's a question of knowledge, of gnosis, of knowing that it is going to come. And this is what authenticates and makes possible the prophetic tradition, that the prophetic tradition is not a guess game. It's not just receiving images haphazard, but it's understanding the patterns and what seeds are there and understanding the growth cycle and how all this comes to be.

Nudge Elizabeth a little bit. Then Philip, because he is extraordinarily capable and because it's been unedited, Philip then moves away from the polarities and puts his finger on how they go astray. And he says names, names, names are given to worldly things and are deceptive. Remember we talked a couple of weeks ago about how names are the most terse form of a myth that you can implode or fold a mythic understanding into a name. So a name becomes very powerful. The name of God must then be hidden, because one must not think that one can have in the name the divinity Phillipps's names are given to worldly things are very deceptive, for they divert our thoughts from what is correct to what is incorrect. That is, they introduce a mentation they introduce in the mind, which comprehends the naming and plays with the naming, and thinks that when it arranges the names, it has arranged what they name. And this is duplicity and the part of the mind and because of its very structure, it tends to work this way. Philip writes thus one who hears the word God does not perceive what is correct, but perceives what is incorrect. Because when you hear the word God, you think of a mental image. Not of God, but of the mental image of God. And in this way, language becomes extraordinarily deceptive, and those who pay attention to language get themselves into a bind until the language becomes purified, until the words become transparent, and allow one to see through the words to that which is, Philip writes.

So also when we say, the father and the son, and the Holy Spirit, and life and light and resurrection, and the church and all the rest, people do not perceive what is correct, but they perceive what is incorrect unless they have come to know what is correct. So the emphasis is upon gnosis, upon knowledge, upon understanding. One single name is not uttered in the world, writes Philip. The name which the father gave to the son, the name above all things, the name of the father. For the son would not become father unless he wears the name of the father. Those who have this name know it, but they do not speak it. Those who do not have it do not know it. This is very curious because that's a direct quotation from the Dao De Jing. The very first beginning of the Dao De Jing is all about names. The Dao that can be named is not the eternal Dao. The name is the mother of 10,000 complications. Those who know of the Dao do not speak of it, and those who speak of the Dao do not know it. It's an exact paraphrase of the opening of the Dao De Jing, which should not surprise those who were here a couple of weeks ago and saw the Chinese elements that Jesus that Jesus drew into his character.

The Chinese elements of the knight errant. The courageous individual who helps the impoverished and the dispossessed saves the maiden from the dragon. Jesus was the first knight errant in Western history, but there were knight errants in Chinese history for hundreds of years before that. That when Knight Errantry came in, when Jesus picked that out and brought that Chinese element in, that he also brought in the alchemy. Because spiritual alchemy had been a Chinese aspect. It had not been in the West. The first spiritual alchemy comes about the same time that Knight Errantry comes out. They come in together the magic of transformation and the application of he who is transformed into a helper for the world. They go together. One does not make gold to have money to buy things with. One transforms a personality so that person becomes a helper for those who need it. They go together. There is no round table without King Arthur. But there's no King Arthur without Merlin. There is no. Way that there's an Israel without David, and there's no David without Samuel. It's that kind of a comprehensiveness that runs all the way through. And Philip is talking comprehensively here. This is a this is an apostle, an original apostle who has been unedited, comes to us exactly direct. And so we see the beautiful comprehension that was there, the almost unsurpassed, uh, clarity of understanding.

But truth brought names into existence in the world because it is not possible to teach it without names. So we have to learn to deal with this level, even though it's perilous and precarious and can deceive us. We have to use it anyway, and so we have to learn how to deal with it, which takes wholeness. Because without wholeness, the very qualities of life that we have to live with will lead us astray. This is why the fulcrum was always that. When you reach a certain period in your life, you must renew your spiritual understanding. When you become an adolescent, you must renew your spiritual understanding. When you reach full maturity and become married, you must renew your spiritual understanding. When you reach a culmination of life and you are to bring everything together again, so that without this spiritual presence which is renewable throughout life, reacquainting oneself with the veracity of spiritual presence, the world becomes increasingly a precedential, legalistic structure which one then must manipulate for one's own good. One must become clever and learn the ropes. When all of the spiritual initiations are taken away from people are not made available to them, then they are trapped in the net. And as we are today, almost nothing exists where people can become acquainted with their own spiritual presence. We have many gurus charging $400 a weekend to go to the LA Convention Center and receive all kinds of hype.

We have gurus that take over whole sections of Oregon, and try to tell us that we are naive and need to have their high priced wisdom imported. It's just indications. Bad odor, that something is rotten. That's all. And Philip talks about that. And Philip also talks about how when someone is spiritually present, there's a fragrance about them and that that fragrance can be perceived. This, of course, is pure Mahayana Buddhist simile, where they talk about the perfuming by wisdom of the good nature. Philip writes, there are powers which contend against man, not wishing him to be saved in order that they may. And then there's a missing part of the manuscript, in order that they may exist. The stubborn, selfish ego has to maintain itself. Because if you mature, if you transform, it has to go. It's like a mask that you won't wear anymore. You'll just take it off. That mask wants to compel you to keep wearing it, otherwise it will have no existence. It's like Miguel de Unamuno, the great Spanish novelist who, having finished writing a series of novels, had a postscript where the characters from the novels come in and tell the writer they have to. He has to write more stories. You've created us. You can't kill us off now. We have a right to live. We have as much right to live as you do. You're the one who created us.

This is a parody on what the mind does. The mind says, I have brought these things into being, and I'm responsible for them. And stubbornly, they're going to be maintained and nobody's going to change things. So our carefully, cleverly crafted sense of egotistical self becomes a very prized creation. We don't want to give it up. And we hear somebody say, you have to lose your life before you can gain eternal life. And we say, there must be a way around that. That must just be metaphorical. That doesn't sound right. In fact, it sounds dangerous. We'll do something else. That's the pithy dialogue that the mind goes through to save itself. For the ego is a construct. It's like a mask that is projected on the mind. But the mind does not understand that the energy for this doesn't come from the mind. The energy comes from a deep ocean. And if that stream of conscious prism is damaged, that negative imagery comes and suffuses this egotistical mind and inflates it and makes it arrogant. And this is just what Philip is going to talk about. Arrogance. Pride cometh before the fall. Every damn time. He writes, there are powers which contend against man not wishing him to be saved in order that they may continue. For if man is saved, they will not. There will not be any sacrifices to them. No animals will be offered to the powers, the very ones.

The animals are they who sacrifice to them. Before Christ came, there was no bread in the world just as Paradise. The place where Adam was, had many trees to nourish the animals, but no wheat to sustain man. Man used to feed like the animals. But when Christ came, the perfect man. He brought bread from heaven in order that man might be nourished with the food of man. Now we hear this as a metaphor. We don't understand the comprehension that Phillip is talking with. The bread that he is talking about is bread wheat. It's called emmer. Now, in these days, when people were dependent for their life, they knew all about bread, wheat. Just like our children know all about computers today. And they knew that bread wheat is a very, very special hybrid. In fact, bread wheat emmer has a double mutation in it. The original goat grass that has 1 or 2 grains had to mutate into a more complex goat grass that had about 16 different grains, and that in its turn mutated into bread wheat, which has, uh, 32 or more grains. But in getting all those grains, the fibers that went in to make the little wings on the grains in goat grass, which are very long, and in the median grass, which are kind of short in bread, wheat, they atrophied so that they're just spikes, and the seeds will not spread themselves. They fall dead on the ground and only the hand of man, understanding that you have to pick those seeds up and scatter them so that there will be more wheat.

So that man had to comprehensively use his hand in the intelligence of the pattern to sow those seeds in order to make the staff of life come through. So Philip is not just using metaphor. He's speaking very, very practically that if you want to have spiritual fruit, there's a time to sow and you have to know what to sow and where to sow it. And without that, you're going to starve to death. Because you can want to have bread all you want. But if you didn't sow the seeds, if you didn't plant and then harvest all in time, you wouldn't have the bread. So the bread is not a metaphor. The bread is a symbol which packs in all of the understanding which we today don't understand anymore. We've lost the sense of life. So he says, there was a time that man just fed like animals. Now we understand that we have the bread, which is a transformative food. We have the wine, which is a transformative drink. It's fermented, it has spirit. The powers, writes Philip, thought that it was by their own power and will that they were doing what they did. But the Holy Spirit, in secret, was accomplishing everything through them as it wished. And this is what is wrong with the demonic is it thinks that it has power and it has nothing.

They're just cardboard image base which are thrown up as projections from the mind, usually thrown onto other people, sometimes thrown onto events and complicated cases, sometimes thrown on oneself. And that produces problem, but generally onto other people. It's always someone else's fault. They have done this, and the projections especially come out when there's inner transformation, when one is compelled to grow up. When one is compelled finally to go from adolescence into maturity, that seems to be the big problem in our time. And even if one comes into maturity. If one is challenged to grow spiritually so that the subconscious imagery also comes up, the natural thing that occurs is that temporarily, the person experiences a covering of these negative subconscious contents and is temporarily regressed back to their adolescence. And if one doesn't know this, one gets into all kinds of trouble. And so we have a civilization run by teenagers who are vicious and are arrogant. And the problem is, there don't seem to be too many adults around to take the dangerous weapons out of their hands. And help them to mature again. Very serious problem. So Philip writes, then the powers thought it was by their own power and will that they were doing what they did. But the Holy Spirit in secret, that is, in a hidden way to the powers, to the ego and the hidden way, was accomplishing everything through them as it wished.

Truth, which existed since the beginning, is sown everywhere. The seeds of truth are sown everywhere. The doctrine for this, um, finally in the Mahayana is the, uh, jewel matrix. Um, understanding that every single atom anywhere in the entire cosmos, in every galactic system, has within it the seed of truth. It's a bodhisattva doctrine also there in Jesus very strongly, and many see it as it is sown, but few are they who see it as it is reaped. And so Philip is now going to talk about how do we come to maturity so that we can reap this harvest. And he says, this is a mystery of the bridal chamber, that the only place that this happens is in the bridal chamber. And he will go on to say that in Jerusalem there are three religious structures. One of them is called the Holy place where everybody can go in to worship. One is called the Holy of Holies, where just a few can go in to worship. And then there's a third place called the holiest of holiest, where only the head priest can go in. And he's going to say that the only head priest that went into the real holiest of holies was Jesus. And there he brought out the method. The gnosis. The actual creating of the presence of how the bridal chamber works for man to unite the polarities. So Philip says, some said Mary conceived by the Holy Spirit, they are in error.

They do not know what they are saying. Why is that? Because the Holy Spirit is Sophia. Sophia. It's not masculine at all. It's feminine. The misunderstanding that wisdom is feminine is due to a flaw in the mentality built into the floor of the church, but not there in original Christianity at all. There the understanding was that the feminine is in fact the most important of all of the elements, because it is only through the feminine that the father and the son are related at all. It's only the feminine value. In her willingness to be fertile, to be pregnant by the father, that there is any child at all. Remember now, the central figure in the book of Revelation is a pregnant woman coming down from heaven, clothed with the sun, the moon at her feet, and 12 stars as a crown. This is a central mystery. Philip writes, when did a woman ever conceived by a woman? Mary is the virgin whom no power defiled. She is a great anathema to the Hebrews. Who are the apostles and the apostolic men. This virgin, whom no power defiled, the powers defile themselves. The Lord would not have said, my father who is in heaven, unless he had had another father. But he would simply have said, my father. Jesus is a hidden name. It's a hidden name. Christ is a revealed name.

For this reason, Jesus does not exist in any other language, but his name is always Jesus, as he is called Christ. Also, his name in Syriac would be Messiah. In Greek it's Christ, in others it's called the Nazarene. Notice that the the title Christ Messiah Nazarene is dependent upon the different languages, but the name Jesus is a personal name does not change because the transformative focus is not the Christ presidential image, but the person of Jesus, the the person of Jesus. That that's the focus where the life actually occurs. And that if it's lost, the whole understanding of it is lost. Philip writes some are afraid lest they rise naked because of this. They wish to rise in the flesh, and they do not know that it is those who wear the flesh who are naked. It is those who to enclose themselves who are not naked. Flesh and blood shall not be able to inherit the kingdom of God. What is this which will not inherit this which is on us? What? But what is this very thing which will inherit it is that that belongs to Jesus and His blood. That the transformation of the personal to the spiritual can be, but only if one becomes personal. That there is no transformation possible at all unless one becomes personal. Because the person is the focus of all of these energies, and only when there is a real person can the energies work.

There's no alchemy without it. There's no spiritual realization without it. If the person is not able to be the focus of these energies, then the surrogate of the person, their mind, their fictions, their fantasies, their ambitions, their arrogance that receives these energies, and of course, it's inapplicable. It just energizes inflation's projections. Arrogances. And one then lives in the midst of a whirlwind, a maelstrom. Everywhere that one turns, life doesn't work. One is offending people and doesn't know why or how things do not work out. One is enmeshed. The only way out is to become the person. That one is that the whole purpose of consciousness is to individuate to become that human being that you are. Because only there at that integrity of focus can those energies really work. Can they focus? And the important thing is that all those energies have to focus together, and the person is the only focus where all of it can be brought together, where the polarities are brought into resolution, there is no other focus that is possible and conceivable, so that the person of Jesus is extraordinarily the great example, not his doctrine, not the parables, not the esoteric, uh, uh, theological structures, but the person, the very man, that guy. That's that's the important thing. So Philip then says. Jesus took them all by stealth, for he did not reveal himself in the manner in which he was, but it was in the manner in which they would be able to see him that he revealed himself, and he revealed himself to all.

He revealed himself to the great. As great. He revealed himself to the small as small. He revealed himself to the angels as an angel and to men as a man. Because of this, his word hid itself from everyone. Some indeed saw him thinking that they were seeing themselves. But when he appeared to his disciples in glory on the Mount, he was not small. He became great because he made the disciples great, that they might be able to see him in his greatness. If you recall, Philip is talking about the Transfiguration. He's talking about the time that he took, um, Peter and John with him up to the top of Mount Hebron and on the top of Mount Hebron, which is the tallest mountain there in, uh, what today is the border of Syria and Lebanon, just north of Israel. I think Israel occupies the Mount Hebron slopes. Um, in 1985, Mount Hebron was the archetypal center of the intrusion into the Jewish mind. If you remember that in the Book of Enoch and literature, it was on Mount Hebron that the fallen angels first contacted the world of men. With the fallen angels coming out of heaven with all of their glory. Contacting the world of men on Mount Hebron. Falling in love with the daughters of men. Having children by them, and these children being what the Enochian literature called giants.

Super people who, when they died because they were half angelic and half man, their spirits didn't go where angelic spirits would be and didn't go where man's spirit would go his soul, that these were aberrations, these were mutations. And instead they lingered around like bad radiation, and that this was the source of the demonic contamination of the world, and that eventually, because they never went away, there was a progressive buildup of this lethal radiation of these demonic mutations, the fallen angels and men. And that they create conditions in people because in order to live their lives out, live events out, they have to inhabit people. And so they specialize in growing situations so that they have plenty of people to live in and live through. This was the angelology and demonology at the time of Jesus. So Philip is talking about how this is, uh, prevented, is that there is a seal that comes with human beings when they are initiated into spiritual presence, and that when their spiritual presence is brought into a special relationship in the bridal chamber, men and women together create a seal where there is no possibility of being contaminated whatsoever, that these people then live in the Kingdom of God. And he's going to say that this is the this is what we find. Now he says this is, um. There were three who always walked with the Lord Mary, his mother and her sister, and Magdalene.

Now Mary's sister who walked with him was Elizabeth, who was the mother of John the Baptist. Jesus and John the Baptist were cousins. Their mothers were sisters. So Mary and Elizabeth and Mary Magdalene always walked together with the Lord. Notice here that there's a quaternary, but only one figure in the Quaternary is masculine, that the other three are feminine. The feminine. The one who was called Mary Magdalene, the one who was called his companion. Mary Magdalene, Philip says, was called his companion, his hers, his sister and his mother and his companion. The father and the son are single names. The Holy Spirit is a double name. For they are everywhere. They are above. They are below. They are in the concealed. They are in the revealed. The Holy Spirit is in the revealed. It is below. It is in the concealed. It is above. And he writes in here. That. It is not possible for anyone to see anything of the things that actually exist unless he becomes like them. And spiritual qualities simply are invisible to someone who is profane. They do not see them at all. Then he writes. To skip over because of time. It is from water and fire that the soul and the spirit came into being. It is from water and fire and light. The son of the bridal chamber came into being. The fire is the chrism.

Chrism, the chrism. Philip. The Gospel of Philip talks about the chrism all the time. The fire is the chrism. The fire is a shaped flame which is purely white. That is, it's a flame of purity that is able to burn only upon the pure heart. If the heart is pure, then this flame of presence occurs on it. And this is the chrism. Notice that fire and water, which are the two universal solvents, when they are brought together instead of their polarities, that the soul comes into being here. The soul is not an object, it's not a thing, but it's a relation that is brought in when the two opposites, fire and water, are brought into unity into relation. The fire is the chrism. The light is the fire. I'm not referring to the fire, which has no form, but to that other fire whose form is white, which is bright and beautiful, and which gives beauty. The Lord did everything in a mystery, a baptism and a chrism, a Eucharist and a redemption, and a bridal chamber. Notice that there are five processes here. There's a quaternary of baptism and the chrism, the Eucharist and the redemption. And then the bridal chamber that the quintessential, the transformative is the bridal chamber, almost completely left out of church theology. Can you stand a little bit more? Yes. A bridal chamber is not for the animals, nor is it for slaves, nor for the defiled woman, but is for free men and virgins.

Through the Holy Spirit, we are indeed begotten again, and we are begotten through Christ into two we are anointed through the spirit. When we were begotten, we were united. None shall be able to see himself either in water or in a mirror without light. Nor again will you be able to see in light without water or mirror. For this reason it is fitting to baptize in the two in the light and the water. He's talking about men and women. You're talking about women in water sense that they have that constancy of reception. Which we have talked about is the Pistis Sophia. The wisdom, the divine wisdom is a universal acceptance of reality, as it is that that quality of acceptance is transformative, and that for the masculine, it's it's the clarity and precision unwavering, which is like light. It is what it is, and the light in the water together are necessary. It is fitting to baptize in the two, in the light and the water. And I'm going to have to skip over again. The chrism is superior to baptism, for it is from the word chrism that we have been called Christians. Certainly not because of the word baptism. Um. Early Christians in the Roman Empire were not called Christians at all. They were called Nazarenes because of the birthplace the Roman mind always thought in terms of geography. One is Greek, one is Egyptian, one is a Latin, one is a Spaniard, one is an English.

They always thought in terms of physical geography, never in terms of people. So they called early Christians because Jesus was from Nazareth. They called them Nazarenes. They had no understanding at all of the person or of the esoteric nature, just a geographical designation. But Philip is saying that we are called Christians because of the chrism, and it is because of the chrism that the Christ has his name, that his name comes from this word chrism, which is this purely white presence, like a flame which occurs when the heart is purified in the person. But that's what that is for. The father anointed the son, and the son anointed the apostles, and the apostles anointed us. And he who has been anointed possesses everything. He possesses the resurrection, the light, the cross, the Holy Spirit, four things the resurrection, the light, the cross, the Holy Spirit. The father gave him this in the bridal chamber. He, Jesus, merely accepted the gift the father was in the son, and the son and the father. This is the kingdom of heaven, that the mutually defining presence of each was in terms of the other, and that this set up a mystical exchange which produced not an identification, but produced the Pleroma, the fullness, the Pleroma, the fullness. It's not an equation type thing of A equals a. That's the way that the mind works.

That's the way that mentation works. It works on equations. It works on identification without the principle of polarity and analogy and identification and differentiation. The mind doesn't work at all. In fact, the mind doesn't exist without that. It's only by those functions occurring that there is anything called mind. One can eliminate that in prayer and in meditation. What he's talking about is that there is a ratio of reality here. It's like x over infinity, and that the coherence of the expression needs both together in order to be, and so that the father and the son are not an identification, but they occur together in the Pleroma. That this is different. This is spiritual, not psychological, not mental. But what Philip is trying to bring across is that we are trapped in a psychological state which has to make room for a spiritual understanding. And the only way that can happen is for the psychological state to give in and quit trying to understand, to just create conditions where the presence can occur. And so the religious mind has to train itself not to be thinking about it all the time. And this is why faith is so important, because only through faith can one use the mind to stop itself from thinking about it and just let presence occur. And this is a quality that women present that the feminine presents. And only when the man understands that. Is there a possibility, then, of learning, of seeing what is real.

Without that, he would never know what is real, because he would always use his mind to lead himself into trying to find out what is real. And he always sees only identifications. He never experiences a presence, and it's only through the feminine, the experiences of presence. And because the problem is psychologically to become human, to become personal, that woman must become human, must become personal or the other way around. So the problem, the very practical problem, how to become real as a person and have a real meeting like in a spiritual marriage. So that one can understand how spirituality is present but does not occur according to precedent. Only the mind occurs according to precedent. So then Philip wants to deliver this, and he uses an image which is almost startling. And this is the image that he uses. The Lords said it well, some have entered the kingdom of heaven laughing, and they have come out. He uses laughter because laughter is joy. It's not euphoria, but it's joy. And so the laughing Saviour comes into being here. The Gnostic understanding of the Laughing Saviour Christ went down into the water. He came out laughing at everything of this world, not because he considers it a trifle, but because he is full of contempt for it. What kind of contempt? Because its constraints are not real. That the mind's identification with those constraints as being real, and then it cleverly synchronizing its plans in terms of the material world, that all of this is a fiction.

None of this is real. All of it is an illusion. And Christ's laughter discloses that there is nothing to worry about at all. There are no problems at all. This is the kind of contempt he who wants to enter the kingdom of heaven will attain it. If he despises everything of this world and scorns it as a trifle, he will come out laughing. So it is also with the bread and the cup and the oil. The early Eucharist was not just bread and wine, but included olive oil. The three together. You see, if you deal with just the bread and the wine, you have a polarity which doesn't have a transformative element in it. The olive oil was the transformative element, the third element that was there in early Christian Eucharist the bread, the oil and the wine. It's amazing when we see how wonderfully legitimate the early experience was, how pristinely intelligent and accurate it was. And we can appreciate then the tremendous skill through the last several thousand years of men's minds trying to figure out in mental terms what it must have been, and trying to amend it and doctor it up so it fit the structure of their minds. And if people can't live by mental structures today, it's because they're absolutely fictive. They have nothing to do with anything. As James Joyce once observed, history is a nightmare I'm trying to wake up from. Let's stop there and we'll come back at this very spot next week.