Revelation and the Gospel of Philip

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Ancient Rome: Rome, Essenes, Alexandria, and the Book of Enoch Presentation 48 of 54 Revelation and the Gospel of Philip Presented by Roger Weir Tuesday, November 5, 1985 Transcript: This is the lecture that was delivered by Roger Weir at the Whirling Rainbow School on Tuesday, November the 5th, 1985. Um, revelation and the Gospel of Philip. There is nothing more difficult to understand than the Book of Revelation. There's nothing that has been more misinterpreted than the Book of Revelation. And this is a condition that held for more than 1800 years. And the reason for this confusion is that the author, Saint John, died before the book was finished. John lived a long time. In his 90s. All of the visions were complete and all of the visions were written down. But he died before the book could be finished. And so there was a interpreter, some companion of his, who was a very good Greek scholar, probably a better Greek scholar than John, but he did not have John's visionary clarity and depth, did not have his scope. Saint John makes it clear that the revelation has a triple guarantee of veracity, that the visions of revelation come directly from God, and that they are given from God to Jesus directly to John, so that this is a triple seal of veracity. This is the thrice greatest Hermes notion. This is the Trinity notion, so that its veracity is triple checked and not only triple check from three different directions, but triple check because the three directions line up. If you have in geometry two points, you then have a straight line. If you have three points, you have the veracity of the straight line, which cannot be amended. It is exactly so and so. The veracity of the revelation of the apocalypse is beyond dispute. What is difficult is that through trying to refine and complete and bring in the end of the book of Revelation, the redactor changed the order of the sequences of the apocalypse so that the Book of Revelation for 1800 years was read in the mixed up order that it was left in. Also, the Greek scholar who did the editing, who did the final polishing, used correct Greek grammar. But Saint John purposely used Greek in a discontinuous way, used words in orders that were not good Greek, not proper grammar, but were good spiritual sense. And so the editor. Being a little bit too zealous to make his master look good, changed some of the usages, some of the words. And so for 1800 years the book of Revelation was mysterious beyond comprehension. It was in a code that could not be understood, could not be broke, and because its veracity was impeccable, no one sought to amend it or change it. It was simply considered one of the most mysterious utterances ever given. Early in the 20th century in England, where there were finally Greek scholars on par with the great Greek scholars when the Greek language was still the language of the realm 2000 years ago, were able to see that the Greek in the Book of Revelation is unique. It's unusual. There isn't any other work in the Greek language, and there are tens of thousands of works that we have in part or in whole. But the Book of Revelation uses Greek and a peculiar, unique way. In other words, it stands out as a single instance of this kind of language, and one has to understand that this was done on purpose, that the author of revelation was bringing together several elements that he had been given over a long period of time, over some 70 years of his life, and that it was his responsibility to bring these into a spiritual comprehension. One of the elements that he was given when he was young, and was given personally by Jesus, was the vision of John the Baptist. That John the Baptist was the last of the prophets of the Old Testament. John the Baptist is the close of the Old Testament prophetic tradition, and as such he is the accumulated visionary power that starts with authors like Isaiah and run through Jeremiah onto Ezekiel, in through Micaiah and Hosea, and so forth. In John the Baptist is the last of the great prophets who still prophesy under the law, under the Torah. And so his vision is a culmination of what can be seen and what can be understood from the standpoint of the law, the Torah, which cannot be changed. But the other John, Saint John, the one beloved of Jesus, has a new vision that never was before, that no human being had ever understood before, which he got from Jesus. And his responsibility was to show the close of an age, but not the close of an age is as to put a period and stop everything. But to show that the close occurred because there was a new beginning that came simultaneously, and as the old closed off, the new came up. And so the Book of Revelation is a great transformation of the nature of reality, not just the close of an old age, in the beginning of a new, but a transition which became a transformation which alchemically dissolved the old World, dissolved the old Jerusalem, dissolved the old basis upon which there could be a temple physically and a city physically, in a place that had geographical historical roots and was sustained according to a law, to a new Jerusalem, which was not in a geographical place, but went from the geography of the land. Transformationally into the heart of the individual, that the New Jerusalem is not on some piece of property, but is in the heart of a human person who has come become fully matured. And for that new Jerusalem to have its efficacy, to have its authenticity, there had to be a new earth and a new heaven, so that the whole nature of reality had to be transformed. And so the responsibility was on Saint John at the end of his life, in his 90s, to consummate this, to bring this together. In searching, to try to find a key. And one needs a key in these complex issues. One needs a fulcrum, an image, a symbol, so that we may begin to understand the tremendousness of what we now can understand. I've chosen a phrase that occurs in revelation that has puzzled people for almost 2000 years. In the process of opening up the seals, after the six seals are opened up and before the seventh seal is opened up, there is in chapter seven of revelation, a tremendous pause in this apocalyptic unfolding. It's as if the glacier of doom is suddenly halted for a moment for a space. And chapter seven in the Book of Revelation brings in then a beatific vision, a beatific vision that, before the trigger is pulled on the seventh seal, that some important activity must be done in this hiatus, in this space that's made, and that it is a space in time and history and circumstance, and within this space, the act that must be performed is that the faithful must be sealed. They must be sealed a mark on their forehead after they are sealed. The seventh seal is opened, and just as the seventh seal is opened, the phrase in chapter eight of the Book of Revelation is that there was in heaven a silence for the space of half an hour, and this is an extraordinary statement. Um, it reads and when he broke the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for half an hour. And I saw seven angels of the presence, and they were given seven trumpets. So when the seventh seal is opened, there is silence in heaven for half an hour. This is an extraordinarily poignant symbolic revelation. And the revelation amounts to something like this. In heaven there is a constant praising of God that what constitutes heaven is a continuous praising of God, the singing of praises, of the hosannas of the hallelujahs that goes on without break, and that the only time in all of creation and all of time that it is stopped, is at this moment of opening the seventh seal, and that's stopped for the space of half an hour. This is an extraordinary event. What is being said here is that all of heaven is silenced for half an hour, so that God can hear not the praises in heaven, but can hear the petition of the faithful from earth in the moment of great travail, when the old reality is dissolving and crumbling and crashing away, and the new reality has not yet come and cannot come unless the faithful petition the divine. The faithful cannot petition the divine cannot have their prayers heard in heaven unless they are sealed. Now the old understanding of being sealed was that one is sealed from physical evil, physical harm. No harm will come to you. You're not going to break any bones. You're not. You're not going to suffer a real death, etc., etc. but the seal that comes in the book of revelation, when you understand the Greek is not a seal against physical harm, it's a seal against demonic possession. It's a seal of the psyche of the soul. Psuche usually pronounced psyche. The Greek is the seal of the soul of the faithful is to guarantee their integrity against demonic. Make interference. And the reason for this is extraordinarily poignant psychologically and revelational in religious sense. The physical body can be harmed physically, but the physical self, the presence that we are, is a non-objective reality. What we really are does not disappear, is not impaired when our body goes. So the actual person who is here in this physical reality is not impaired by the impairment of the physical self. You can cut off arms and legs and so forth. You can even lose your physical life, but the person is not affected by that. So to seal oneself against physical harm at this poignant, peculiar stage of transformation would be a misunderstanding. Now, the very deepest levels, the eternal levels within ourselves, cannot be touched. They cannot be damaged. Those eternal images are verities which were there before the universe was made. That's the traditional statement on it. In other words, the archetypal ocean cannot be touched by anything that happens in the present. You can't change the nature of the Divine Father by doing something here and now in 1985. You can't destroy the significance of the Great Mother by anything that you do here. If you shop at Vons and not Safeway, it's not going to affect it. If you decide personally that you're not going to believe in it, it doesn't doesn't matter. Those deep images, those eternal images are untouched. But what can be manipulated is the subconscious imagery, because that subconscious imagery comes up not in the person so much and not in the eternal levels, but in the malleable middle ground in between. And where it comes up is in the imagination, because the stream of consciousness material usually comes up first in feeling, tones, feelings, and it only has imagery later on, and the imagery creates our imagination. And it is this, um, mobility of the imagination and its tie feelingly to the stream of the subconscious that makes it prone to being played with, to being misdirect added. And the demonic elements address themselves to this quality, to the imagination, to the stream of the subconscious, so that one can be influenced without being conscious of it. One can be influenced without there being the security of the eternal verities. It is this quality that must be addressed. It is this quality that is the poignancy of the ceiling in the book of revelation. One cannot understand this unless we go back to the secret gospel of Philip for a moment and review here what Philip is able to disclose to us about the nature of Jesus. Now, we're not talking about the Christ. We're not talking about a theological entity. We're not talking about a doctrinaire person or anything. We're talking about the person Jesus, and what his task was. And in Philip, he writes most things in the world, as long as they're inner parts are hidden, stand upright and live. If they are revealed, they die, as is illustrated by the visible man. As long as the intestines of the man are hidden, the man is alive. When his intestines are exposed and come out of the man, the man will die. So also with the tree, while its root is hidden, it sprouts and grows. If its root is exposed, the tree dries up. So it is with every birth that is in the world, not only with the revealed, but with the hidden. For so long as the root of wickedness is hidden, it is strong. So long as the root of wickedness is hidden, it is strong. Let's pause here for a moment. It does no good to cut off the fruits, the leaves, the branches, the trunk, that it's the root that has to be gotten out. Now the root here. Where is the root of this? The root here is in this stream of subconscious imagery. And the root of it is that it is not evil. So much is that it has a built in ambiguity which is necessary for its transformational function. The stream of consciousness must move. It must be pliable. It must also be able to be mobile in the feeling sense, and not be codified in terms of thought, not to have a real structure, uh, which is irrevocable. And so it's mobile, it's facile by its very nature and the imagination is like that. It is the imaginative ambiguity or the ambiguity of the imagination, which, when it goes sour, is the hidden root of evil. And it's this that must be pulled up, that is, it must be made conscious, it must be brought out. And this bringing out is very, very, very difficult. In fact, Philip says, for as long as the root of wickedness is hidden, it is strong, but when it is recognized, it is dissolved. We have to see the error of our ways. We have to have someone pull out from us the negativities, the negativities occur there not because someone is putting them there, but because by the nature of becoming a person in a positive sense, in an existential sense, there is a natural balance where there is a non person that also occurs. You can use Jungian language if you want that. Wherever there is an ego, there is a shadow. The shadow is cast by the ego. Whenever anyone has a persona, a mask, an ego structure, there is a non ego, a non self which exists here on this stream of subconscious level. If that is not brought together into a harmony, if the I and the not, I are not brought together. If there is not this meeting of wholeness in these elements, then the vicissitudes of life which, um, seek to influence and push and pull on the ego also do this in a topsy turvy way, on the shadow, and through just the natural functioning of defending, of making one's way in life, one gains distortion. So Philip says when it is recognized, it is dissolved. When it is revealed, it perishes. So all of this has to be brought up. The negativities are in everyone. No one is exempt because it is a natural part of being human. One cannot be a human being without having these negativities. They must be brought up. But when they are brought up, if they are only partially brought up, one becomes extremely fearful, one becomes very phobic, one becomes extremely authoritarian, one becomes a panicky one becomes a flighty one experiences that as a death, and the death experience causes us to have this fight or flight reaction. We must get out of there. We must get out of the situation. Somebody who has done this to us is it must be at fault or some event that has done this to us. We're going to shy away from it. Now, sometimes this happens naturally, sometimes with certain individuals. It'll it'll happen all of a course in the most mundane events. All of a sudden you can be eating pizza and all of a sudden it happens. A feeling of blanked out ness, a feeling of of desperateness utter despair. There's no handle to it. There's no way to deal with it. It seems to inundate one. This kind of a quality is what Philip is talking about. And he says that is why the word says already the axe is laid at the root of the trees. It will not merely cut what is cut sprouts again. But the axe penetrates deeply until it brings up the root. Jesus pulled out the root of the whole place, while others did it only partially. As for ourselves, let each one of us dig down after the root of evil which is within one, and let one pluck it out of one's heart from the root. It will be plucked out if we recognize it, but if we are ignorant of it, it takes root in us and produces its fruit in our heart. It masters us. We are. It slaves. It takes us captive to make us do what we do not want to do. So it is masterful in the highest sense of wholesomeness for someone to pull this non-self, this negativity out of the human being so that it can be brought into consciousness so that a new person can be formed, that this new person then will be able to live in the conditions of the New Jerusalem. We'll be able to live in a universe where there is a new heaven and a new earth. But Jesus went further than that. Philip is saying that he pulled out the root from the whole place, meaning the whole universe as as an entity that just as there is a shadow for individual human beings, there is this kind of equality which comes in the universe as a whole. And this is what Jesus addressed himself to, to bringing out that quality which was evil when it was hidden, but when it was exposed, it died. But its death was a transformation of then adding that value to life, so that life then is no longer polarized, but is brought into a completeness. No longer is there. This tension between opposites which are incommensurate and the imagination. Then when it is soured, when it is skewed, and it almost always happens in life, one then makes fantasy shapes out of these tension lines, and then, because they are not real, seeks to project those onto the world, onto other people, seeks to make those happen. We try to create melodramas whereby we choreograph the very fears that we would have. All of this happens in this realm of the soul, of the psyche, of the psyche, of the mind, in the realm of the mind. And so knowledge or gnosis is the core of what the secret Gospel of Philip is about, that one must know. And in fact, man can know because he was already given of the tree of knowledge, the knowledge between good and evil, the knowledge of the opposites. He knew that, but what he did not have was participation in the tree of Life. And what Jesus was doing at the same time is bringing this gnosis, this knowledge, back into man's remembrance was adding to it a quality which had not been fully there before. And that was to realize that life has a quality which is not included in knowledge, that life itself has a quality of wholesomeness called completeness, and that whereas knowledge in its wholesomeness understands perfection, life is not complete, is not completed by the attainment of perfection alone. The idea of perfection is abstract when it is taken away, or when it is not set into life. The livingness. So the emphasis was always that there is light, there is lumen. One knows, but that the light must be put into the life of men, that human beings must in their life have this light, that the experience of the perfection must be set in the context of the completeness of life. This is different. This yields something else. Then we are not slaves. Then we are no longer captive. And the worst master, of course, is the tyrannical, unrealized self. So Philip writes, as long as it is hidden, wickedness is indeed ineffectual, but it has not been removed from the midst of the seed of the Holy Spirit. They're slaves of evil. But when it is revealed when the perfect light will flow out of every one, and all those who are in it will receive the chrism, then the slaves will be free and the captives ransomed. Every plant which my father who is in heaven has not planted will be plucked out. Those who are separated will be united and will be filled. Every one who will enter the bridal chamber will kindle the light, for it burns. Just as in the marriages which are observed, though they happen at night. That fire of the spiritual marriage burns, uh, both day and night. So they're likening it to the the veracity of the marriage and the veracity of a marriage, which has its veracity confirmed in the night. The spiritual marriage has its veracity confirmed both day and night, so that it is a completeness and not just a human perfection. And the Gospel of Philip ends with this saying, but the mysteries of this marriage are perfected in the day and the light. Neither the day nor its light ever sets. If anyone becomes a son of the bridal chamber, he will receive the light. If anyone does not receive it while he is in these places, he will not be able to receive it in the other place. He who will receive that light will not be seen, nor can he be detained, and none shall be able to torment a person like this, even while he dwells in the world. And again when he leaves the world, he has already received the truth in the images. The world has become the aeon, for the Aeon is fullness. For him this is the way it is. It is revealed to him alone, not hidden in the darkness and the night, but hidden in the perfect day and a holy light. The gospel according to Philip, which of course was hidden, found with the Nag Hammadi material translated and published just a few years ago. And so we have, curiously enough, the discovery of this ancient material, unedited by anyone. No one has tampered with it. We have it just as it was written some 1900 years ago. And that happens just at the same time as our perspective and knowledge of the books of the Bible reaches a maturity which had never been there before. This confluence of new material and a corrected perspective of understanding have come together in the 1980s. This decade, this last five years have come together and have imploded into a vision that what has been misunderstood all the time is the nature of spiritual reality, that we have been laboring under a curse. And this is why the world has progressively repeated its mistakes in ever larger cycles of death and disfiguration why we live in a time of universal terror. Because this cycle has run itself like an addict who finally reaches the, um, ultimate need of having a permanent fix all the time. It cannot go any further. And so this message of this material comes to us just at the exact opportune time, and in a way which anyone can understand is not limited to experts. It is not limited to the so-called wise. We do not have to queue up to some master to understand this. We don't have to wait for the right guru to come along. We ourselves in our own way, fiddling if it seems like that to you, but actually inquiring and rather responsible way can piece together enough material with just a little bit of cues from someone like me. Just a little bit of of saying, look here, look here, how about this? How about that can put together for ourselves a view which will sustain itself and hold itself. I'm going to go to a volume, two volumes by a man named R.H. Charles, who is the first person to be able to understand some of the intricacies of the Greek language enough to realize that the Book of Revelation is not a puzzle for metaphysical understanding, but was a. Infusion because of editing, and that the editor did not understand that the distorted syntax was distorted on purpose. In order to show that he was not talking about mundane things, he was not talking about the everyday world. He was talking in a visionary way. And so the Book of Revelation is actually very great poetry. And it took a long time to realize that it was in poetry. Here is an example of the poetry and what is peculiar here, as Charles points out, that though Saint John was writing in Greek, in visionary Greek, he was thinking in terms of Hebrew that his mind as a human person, as a man, had been raised from childhood to think in Hebrew so that his natural thinking reflexes were in the Hebrew language, but because in his serenus, in his visionary ness he saw in the Greek language his visions came clearly in Greek. But when he went to write them, his writing syntax was more Hebrew than Greek. And this accounts for the distortion of the Greek language, and also accounts for the tremendous spiritual energy of Saint John to be able to bridge two language realms precisely, and the difficulty of the Book of Revelation is that it rests itself precariously on this knife edge between the Greek and the Hebrew minds, between the Greek and the Hebrew languages, between the Old Testament of the Hebrew tradition and the New Testament of the Greco Hellenistic tradition. In fact, when the language of Saint John is not translated from Greek into English, but is first translated from Greek into Hebrew and then into English, the word order comes out right. Here's an example. Here's a description of the new creation and the blessedness of the righteous therein, which really is the close of the apocalypse. The apocalypse closes with this poem, as it were. And so here's the vision. And he that sat upon the throne said the former, things have passed away. Behold, I make all things new. And I saw a new heaven and a new earth for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no more sea. And the holy city, New Jerusalem, I saw coming down out of heaven from God, made ready as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a great voice from the throne, saying, behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he shall dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and he shall be their God. And God shall wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more. Neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore. Neither shall there be any more curse. And the throne of God and the lamb shall be in it, and his servants shall serve him. And they shall see his face, and his name shall be on their foreheads. And there shall be no more night. And they shall have no need of lamp or light of sun. For the Lord God shall cause his face to shine upon them, and they shall reign forever and ever. This is the proper close. This is the proper translation into English of the close of the apocalypse. And it's the first time it was ever done. This was 1919. In fact, the only thing that follows this closing poem and the poem is written in the Hebrew style of the quatrain, where every other line reinforces the line that went before it. Hebrew wisdom literature. Old Testament spiritual poetry always has that couplet where something is said and then something is said that complements it or parallels it, or is it, um, a reverse of it or an obverse of it? The second line, every other line, always, um, like an adjective, helps define the meaning of the first line so that one has a comparison all the way down. The only thing that comes after these is in an epilogue, where the assertion is that this vision is not from man, that this vision is a direct line from God to Jesus to John. And that its triple veracity makes it impeccable. And that's all that follows this poem. In fact, it could be seen when this technique was applied to other sections of the Book of Revelation that the chapters 4 to 11 are extraordinarily different in tone. There is a different person who is there, the writer is different, and the writer. In the translation of revelation, which was made in 1975, in the new Anchor Bible, um, one can reconstruct now that this was the revelation given to John the Baptist, and that he wrote this down somewhere before Jesus began his mission. So it would have been written somewhere in the late 20s, BC 28, 29, maybe as late as 30 BC. It was written before Jesus began his mission, and was preserved and was preserved by someone who knew that he had written this down. And because this was a prophecy, which was secret, because it was the close, the culmination of a whole, uh, I have to use the Gnostic terms here, Aeon, a whole epoch of spiritual reality had been brought to a close. The only person that would have had this would have been Jesus, who passed it on to John chapter four. Just for a second 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. This throne image is very, very powerful in Hebrew prophecy. Its first appearance is in Isaiah that there is a throne of God, that God is a royalty par excellence, that he is King of kings. And the notion here is very powerful, that the kingliness, the kingliness, is the seeing to the health of the whole of the kingdom. This is the responsibility of a king. He's not just a leader. He's not just a president or a premier, but a king is responsible for the health of the kingdom. And since the king is responsible for the health or the wholeness of the kingdom, a king of kings is responsible for the health and wholeness of all the kingdoms. There are. So the throne of God has this powerful image. The most spectacular use of the throne is in the great prophet Ezekiel, in Ezekiel, who was monumentally important. In fact, Ezekiel and the revelation go together. They have a relationship which has been seen, uh, all throughout, um, occult and spiritual history. In fact, not only Ezekiel, but the book of Daniel and the revelation. Those three together form a kind of a triple point straight line that the veracity of Ezekiel is like the veracity from God. The veracity of Daniel is like the veracity from Jesus before anything happened physiologically, before anything happened historically. And the veracity of revelation is from John. In fact, the Johns put together does this hold? Does this hole in the book of revelation. Here is a description by Saint John in chapter one of the Book of Revelation. He says, I was in the spirit on the Lord's day, and I heard behind me a voice loud like a trumpet, saying, write what you see in a book, and send it to the seven communities to Ephesus and Smyrna, to Pergamum, to Theotokia, to Sardis, to Philadelphia, to Laodicea. And I turned to see the voice which spoke to me. And when I turned, I saw seven golden lampstands. Now the seven golden lampstands, when they are together are the menorah. The symbol of perfection in the Old Testament. The seven tiered candelabra of the menorah. But in this vision, the unity of the menorah is separated into seven individualities, so that the unity is not in the singleness of the object, but the unity is in the relationality to completeness of the seven individuals. So that while there was only one temple in Jerusalem in the Old Testament, there are now seven churches in seven communities which have their integrity together. Because it's a new kind of community. It's not a community of one. It's a community of a unified relation between seven or, if you wish now, to think it among many, that the unity is not in a physiological, geographical sense, but the unity is in a spiritual sense. It is the spiritual sense that makes them a unity. And so he sees seven gold lampstands. And in the midst of that visionary symbol, in the midst of the seven golden lampstands, was one like a son of man, one like a son of man. And he uses the phrase son of man. And the only place that that was used in the Old Testament is in the Book of Daniel, when there was the test of the three companions of Daniel, Daniel and his three companions, and they were put into the oven Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. That was their Babylonian names. When they were put into the furnace to see whether, if the Lord were with them, they would survive the fiery heat of this furnace. And when they looked into the furnace, they could see that they were surviving, but that there was someone else there. And the description in the book of Daniel you can check for yourself is that there was someone in there whose hair was like white wool, whose eyes were red, and whose skin was bronzed like brass and burnished. John turns and sees seven golden lampstands in the midst, one like a son of man, clothed in ankle length garment, tied above the waist with a golden girdle. The hair of his head was snow white like white wool. The eyes were like flaming fire. His feet glowed like bronze, had been fired in an oven, and his voice sounded like the roar of rushing waters. The veracity from Ezekiel and Daniel and the Book of Revelation is like a triple coordinate from the culmination of the Old Testament, in its prophetic mode to the transition Hellenistic prophetic mode of the Book of Daniel, to the final stage of the transformation in the Book of Revelation to the New Jerusalem, the New Covenant. New conditions a new heaven, no longer a heaven, which can be presented by a single menorah, but a heaven where the menorah now is mobile in its seven ness, so that the relationality are what are real and not the thing. The objective need to have reality posited in objects is now transformed. The reality now is in relationality, where the old law was based on precedent. The new understanding is based on presence and love. The law of love, the law of love is that there is not a rule structure to go by, but that there is an integrity to achieve in love. One cannot consult rule books. In love, one must offer integrity to the beloved and be able to keep that. That's the faithfulness of it. So the Book of Revelation then has this kind of a quality to it. The the integrity is misunderstood. If the human person is integrated in isolation, one of the unfortunate elements that crept in and has crept into almost every world tradition, which is why the world religions have not performed for human beings, none of them have performed for human beings, is the notion that individuals have to perfect themselves by themselves. You have to go off by yourself to be a Yogi. You have to go off and be a monk in order to be spiritual. This is a masculine perfection ideal, which has been one sidedly thrust into the very essence of the spiritual process. And this is true in terms of the abstract reality. But it is a lie when it comes to life, because. Life cannot go on. It cannot even exist unless there is a meeting together, a marriage and life and marriage and meeting and faithfulness. These are feminine values. These are the values that are there from wisdom. Sophia. The raising up of a Virgin Mary is a masculine idea of femininity, a virgin mother. But the very firm virgin mother is a non sequitur. It is a transformation that's in there. One cannot have a virgin mother in life terms, that the very phrase shows a transformation from purity to fullness to participating in a marriage by having an integrity of having one's husband, one's family, one's children, and that this integrity is what life is based on, and this is the knowledge of the tree of life, and that it is not so much that man is thrown out of Paradise, so that he does not taste of the fruit of the tree of life. It's that tasting of the tree of knowledge first forbids him to understand that this other value is absolutely essential to complement the one that he just discovered, so that we have an extraordinary situation. We have people believing that the only people who are going to be saved are celibate monks, and this ideal has been held like a sword of Damocles over people by church structures who actually fear life, not just the Christian church. Every single religion in the world has this kind of a bias in it. Why is this so? Because this is a phenomenon not of religious structures, but of the human mind. The human mind in its functioning always makes this mistake. Cannot help but make this mistake, and only by humility can the mind come to understand and recognize that it has abstracted value out of life, and that by abstracting value out of life, it has dried up the very sources that permit life to be. And, um, one can go and hear a this is a lectures on the apocalypse by R.H. Charles, published by Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1922, and on page 28 you can find in here. Um uh, an examination of how the Greek language was toyed with. And the misinterpretation happened, uh, very early on. By the early second century AD, the floor was there already. The mistake was there. He writes, um, the the editor thought that he found here a fit occasion for introducing his ascetic views, owing to his misconception of the Greek word um, uh, a parquet, a parquet, a p a r c h e a parquet. He took this word to mean the first fruits or elite of the saints, the idea of priority shading off into superiority, the idea of priority becoming superiority. You see the mind when it works towards perfection. Always then selects out more and more. This is how priorities happen. One selects more and more. What are the priorities? And in the selection, one always arranges them to try to get to one. What is the priority? And when one gets to one, then one has not priority but superiority. But in this process of selecting, of abstracting and rearranging and getting to one, one has already blinded oneself to life qualities. One has only perfection as a single quality, which is there 100% pure and cannot see what is supposed to be impure. This, of course, is a blindness, the spiritual blindness, and left to itself, the mind, untutored by life, will tend always more and more towards this error, towards this. Mistake. It is a built in function of its nature. This is why the old Soyuz don't live by your mind alone. Your heart is also important. Why is the heart? Because the heart is the center. The focus of love and love is the quality which makes life understandable in terms of its completeness that one cannot do it alone. One needs another. There needs to be such a thing as a marriage. There needs to be such a thing as preparation to give oneself to the other. This is extraordinary. The word eparchy then, has no such meaning as first fruit or as an elite. Three times out of four it means sacrifice or gift, sacrifice, giving up or giving, giving of oneself to another. The very essence of the marriage in the Greek of our author's time and in the inscriptions of the neighborhood of Ephesus, it was always and generally used in this sense. So we have this error which has crept in. And of course, in our time, more and more, we are inundated with so-called masters who say that the individual must abstain from life in order to become perfect, that one must not participate in life, that it's impure, and one must, uh, conserve oneself in one's self. This promotes pride, this promotes the ego. And the more that this is promoted, the more the mind enjoys its urge for perfection. It's a authoritarian sense of inflation that it's getting its priorities straight. And very soon it will have the priorities straight and will find the number one priority and will be superior. Fortunately, people are generally inept and not able to do this, but. And catch themselves with humor. Or somebody says you're out of line, buster, long before it happens. But when it happens, it becomes almost demonic. And when it happens, it happens not only to individuals, but to whole countries, to whole civilizations. Nazi Germany, in our time, is just such a civilization that went haywire on perfection and lost all sense of life, all sense of life. The modern world, with its emphasis on computers, with its emphasis on machines, is inculcating into its very structure, not life processes, processes, but mind processes and the mind processes, by their natural function, unchecked by life values, tend more and more and more towards this ultimate fascistic perfection, where life is wiped clean because it's just impure and doesn't fit. So it's appropriate. The 2000 years later, this material comes to the surface, right on schedule, right on time to say that it is life values that we need. It is the faithfulness of marriage that we need and not more high powered yogis. We don't need any more high powered yogis. We don't need any more people who have all of their key to themselves and can throw it out on somebody else. We don't want to have it thrown out on somebody else. We want to have life values because life needs its completeness and it needs cooperation. It needs the ability of people to enjoy the mysteries of the bridal chamber. Because as the Gospel of Philip says, it is only then that we understand that this is the pattern for the spiritual marriage, and that the spiritual marriage is a permanent, eternal covenant which, once established, is never broken. We'll come back to more revelation next week, and I will try to bring in the Gospel of Saint John a little bit to show the relation in the Gospel of Saint John to the apocalypse, because that relation in the Gospel of Saint John is very, very close and sort of the complement to the relation between the revelation and the Gospel of Philip. Philip and John are very much complements. John talks about the light and. Philip talks about the life and life and light go together. Life and light, when they're brought together, are a syzygy. They're a completeness. The other syzygy was between Simon Magus and Simon Peter, between the realm of the magical origins of consciousness and the religious culmination of consciousness in the cosmos. But without John and Philip, Peter and Simon Magus become a deadly struggle between good and evil, and the only way to resolve that deadly struggle between evil magic and good religion is to see the coordinate between life and light in its reality, and then the stress, the strain, the ambiguity, the warfare, the war between the children of light and the children of darkness as seen as a false polarity. And that that polarity then becomes a complementarity. And it's this site, it's this vision, it's this understanding. It's living by this quality that makes the New Jerusalem. It's that understanding that makes the New Jerusalem. And it takes every bit of kindliness and intelligence that we can bring to it. So we'll see some more of it next week.